Culture Creates Winners

Winning and losing aren’t opposites.

They’re information.

In this episode, Gregory Vetter and Brian Vetter discuss how strong cultures are built. Not through perfection, but through effort, accountability, and honest feedback.

They explore how leaders can create environments where people are allowed to test ideas, experience failure, speak openly, and bring solutions forward.

Because when people feel safe enough to try—and disciplined enough to learn from mistakes—you start to see who truly wants the opportunity.

The conversation also dives into why culture must be grounded in authenticity and why joy still matters, even in competitive environments.

When people enjoy the process, they push harder, think bigger, and take ownership of the outcome.

Press play to hear how great teams are built from the inside out.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

A fit rod from the head down, from like a head coach or a CEO, anything, your standard of what you care about and what matters to you is eventually gonna be what the culture is. Going back to this concept of hot and not odd. You gotta fucking live. And I think from a leadership perspective, if you really fucking care and you can find people that really care, and you have something that is special, and then you can communicate that day in and day out with a very clear and consistent message, you can start to build a culture around it. We had to convince him not to go on the real world when he was in college because he would have been blacklisted by society forever. So we're this is usually a tamed version because Mo edits out anything too crazy. But um Brian and I, and then Genevieve and Matt eventually built Tessie Mays from One Whole Foods to the number one organic salad dressing brand in the country. And the biggest key, I think, outside of us inventing clean manufacturing and making a product that was good was creating a culture and a lifestyle brand around something that was really dumb. And salad dressing, and I say this all the time, there's nothing dumber than salad dressing in the grand scheme of products. And then to build a culture around something that dumb with people so passionate and energetic and focused was probably one of the cooler things that we've ever done. So we posted something. Give us topics you want to hear us talk about. And one guy posted uh he's got, I think it's like a meat processing plant, or he's in the the meat business, and his was how do you build a culture around something that's not sexy? And that's actually a question I have answered multiple times. Um, I've answered it for a guy that was in concrete, I've done it with a lot of the blue-collar work with these companies that do something cool, but they're trying to figure out a culture to get everybody locked in so that they can then scale, because at the end of the day, you're only as good as your people. So as we talk about building cultures, Brian and I did that, and I think it's a good, interesting topic to dig into. And so the first thing I remember doing, and then we'll unleash this to wherever it goes, is we created on a whim that ended up being unchanged for the next 16 years, but we created these like amazing core values, and everything we did lived within the core values. We hired people based on the core values, we fired people based on the core values, we had performance reviews based on the core values, we built the company based on the core values, and I think for a lot of people, and we were both elite athletes, Brian thinks more elite than me, but that's neither here nor there. The data suggests we'll get into that as well. But in these very elite teams, it comes down to the core values of the team. Is everybody bought in? Are there any kinks in the armor? Does everybody believe? And Netflix just came out with uh the documentary on the 1980 Olympic hockey team, The Miracle, uh, which is one of my favorite sports movies of all time. Uh, and now they did kind of a deep dive to all of the guys kind of before the Olympics happened, and they just interviewed these dudes, and they went over all Herb Brooks' letters and his speeches and everybody that was involved. And it's actually amazing the Disney movie um did it almost perfect justice to what actually was happening. Right. It's pretty fucking amazing. So, building a culture around non-sexy work and businesses that are not quote unquote cool.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

What are your thoughts on that? Well, as per usual, I was unplanned on the topic, so I just get to flow. That's how we do it. Mo just asked me 20 minutes ago, what were we gonna talk about? I go, I think we're gonna talk about this. So the thing that kept ringing in my head was how you do something is how you do everything. It's a universal law. And so when we were building salad dressing, throwing a house party, playing sports, we would go full speed unappo unapologetically because it was just how we get down. And I mean, I think people get confused on like the product side versus the effort side, and every product is kind of dumb in the grand scheme of things, like shoes, not really that cool, stinky, dirty, you have to get new ones all the time. Jordan made Nike cool. Tessie Mays in that story, I think, is kind of funny because it made eating clean suckless. Yep. So I think as you're building a culture, you kind of have to let like the indirect messaging kind of speak to you as consumers are giving you feedback. And then at the same time, you have to be brutally honest when people were like, Well, guys, how much do you love salad dressing? And I was like, I actually don't think I like salad dressing at all. I like the way this tastes and it allows me to eat healthy, and therefore I have a happier life. So I guess that makes me like salad dressing, but I don't like salad dressing other than my mom's anyway. And that was when we just had one recipe anyway. Um, but yeah, I think it's just about like who you are as a person and the expectations you have for yourself and for your reputation and what you represent. That's kind of the foundation in my eyes of any sort of culture that's real.

SPEAKER_01 7:10

It kind of goes to parenting as well. I keep using this phrase, I heard it a month ago, and it kind of defines how we parent anyway, but it's caught, it's not taught. So so often you hear parents, well, I can't get my kids to have a good morning routine. Well, do you have a good morning routine? No. Okay, so why would they? I can't get my kids to eat well. Do you eat well? Well, no. Okay. They're going to see what you do, and they're going to choose whether or not what you say aligns with what you do. So they're catching your vibes 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And I think for our culture, we looked at it and we said, and I remember this distinctly when we were kind of designing the logo and everything. I want people to be as proud putting on a Tessie May sweatshirt as we were wearing our college or pro sports team stuff. Yeah. Like you should put on your hoodie or your hat, and it should mean something. So then it was like, well, how can it mean something? And so one of the main things we did, I think, that was really worked kind of long term was an emphasis on the pursuit of the American dream and building, we always use the phrase the next great American brand. Because I think when you can take something as unsexy as food manufacturing, specifically salad dressing, then you layer in the pillar of we're going after the American dream. And then you layer in another pillar of we're building the next great American brand. It's like, okay, American dream, the next great brand. I fuck with that. And then you layer in the next pillar, which was it's making clean eating easy and suck less because everything tastes good. Then you can take all of that and combine it into a culture where people are diehard in the the different things that they already care about. So we lived in like that kind of crossfit fitness paleo world for a while because all of those people were diehard. Yep. So that was easy, right? We were building performance menu plans, and we were sponsoring athletes, and we were creating fucking shirts and stuff for people to do races. That's fun. So you take something dumb, salad dressing, and then you layer it over top of something fun. And so when I think about meat processing, right? I mean, honestly, for us, we're eating almost Amish, right? And you know, carnivore-esque. I mean, I don't know if there's anything more important than grass-fed quality.

SPEAKER_00 10:45

Well, dude, think about the flying W guys. I know. You go out there to this farm, seven generations, and all they talk about is the seed that they feed their animals with, the fermentation process, and then what like brought me into it was they couldn't buy any industrial processing equipment for food uh to treat the animals with antibiotics, nothing. They had to build everything by hand. So right there, you're like, wait, this is sick. They're doing shit the right way, regardless of how hard it is. Yeah. And they have to they lose every so Don goes, yeah, like we can't really get warranties on anything anymore because me and my dad are like, well, this just isn't gonna work. So we have to break these things down and rebuild them to our specs. Yep. Um, because the weight is different, the cut is different, the bone density is different. So it's kind of crazy. Um, the other thing that's kind of interesting about this is when we had to rewrite the code to be able to use fresh food in food in America.

SPEAKER_01 11:54

Yeah. With the process authority. That was wild. Well, this goes back to this thing of one of our themes from a branding and marketing perspective, and that's kind of the next phase. Once you kind of have the value set and the communication strategy set around the values, then there were these brand themes, one of which was rebellious joy, where we took pride in doing things in ways that had never been done before. And so no one had used fresh garlic in a dressing or sauce before us ever. In the US. In the US, they were using dehydrated garlic, they were using garlic powder, they were using pre-chopped um garlic that had been soaked in citric acid and some other weird shit. And the process authority guy calls us and is like, hey, you know, your your process is illegal and it's gonna kill everybody. And we're like, How? Well, you can't use fresh garlic. Why? Well, there's a botulism scare in 1978.

SPEAKER_00 13:15

And we're like in Canada.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

Yeah. And like one person got sick, and so then they rewrote the entire pro and we're like, all of Europe uses garlic every fucking day. No one is dying over there. And they're like, Well, you gotta figure out a kill step, and so you gotta use these acids or weird. Um, we're like, no. And so just by being stubborn assholes within this rebellious joy kind of value system, we created a new way to use fresh garlic in America in food manufacturing.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

Well, and we kept telling them, we're like, dude, that's gonna taste like shit.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

It's like our mom made us promise we're not gonna change the way it tastes, no matter what. So that's kind of funny, too, to think about those little things. It's like, and we didn't know how to change it anyway because of the formula.

SPEAKER_01 14:14

Because we didn't know how to make salad dressing. Yeah, we were like, bro, we got we got one recipe, dude. We can't fuck this up. Sorry, sir. It's not gonna work. So I think when you're thinking about creating a company or a brand that defies the laws of logic, I would say the first thing you should probably do is work backwards from people getting excited about it. Right? Like walk into an aisle and look at everything that exists. None of it, for the most part, is really that inspiring. The stories are really not that cool. I mean, for the past 10 years, now everybody tries to create a story that kind of sounds cool. Right. They're trying to follow some template. I don't really buy into it anymore because I think it's all just cool washed. You know, everybody wants to make something dumb cool. But I think authentically, going back to this concept of caught and not taught, you gotta fucking live it. It needs to be who you are because uh shit is gonna get really hard, and if you don't actually buy into the process or the vision, there's no fucking way that when tu when times get really tough, you're gonna still live into that, and then everybody's gonna see it was all just a facade, and then the culture's just gonna basically crumble.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

Yeah. I'm thinking about every time everyone said no to us, which was almost every single time we went to launch a new division, a new retailer, and they had their template of just saying no, right? Like ignore the emails, ignore the calls, ignore, ignore, ignore. And then when you like, when they feel your vibe and they feel your thing, they're like, Jesus, dude, like I'd eat anything you're selling. Yeah. And you start to hear that. And then I guess in hindsight, it was so organically a part of us in our life and our journey because we had been eating it with mom and dad our whole lives. And anytime mom went to change the mustard or the salt or the oil, we wouldn't eat it. Not because we knew what wellness was or health was. We're like, that tastes like shit. And then once she could consistently like make it and still didn't write down the recipe or whatever, I think that's super interesting to think about. I never felt like I went to work, right? I never felt like I was doing something wrong. It was always like we have to give access to this product because it will give you a better life, because you will eat healthier, you will believe in innovation again in food. Because everybody was innovating in like the anti-food, fake eggs, fake mayonnaise.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

Yeah, that was very big in the moment of was it just? Yeah, but it was this whole concept of like there's a food shortage, everything needs to be genetically modified, real food's killing the world, you know, cows, farts are destroying the planet, chickens' eggs are, you know, destroying uh society as a whole, and you're just kind of looking around, you're like, dude, what the fuck are you guys talking about?

SPEAKER_00 17:52

Dude, when we would go meet with these people and we would hit them with the look, we don't know what we're talking about here as far as like getting on your shelf or whatever it is you need me to know. Like, we'll get a broker for that, we'll get an account manager for that. But just think about this who's more excited to pitch their product, Tessie Mays or our competitor? And they would always smirk because we would never name a name and they would never really be able to react. But they were like, if I can feel like you or at least act like you because I eat your product, I'll never eat anybody else's shit again.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

And that was always funny to hear. Well, and I guess it goes back to a fish rots from the head down from like a head coach or a CEO, anything, your standard of what you care about and what matters to you is eventually going to be what the culture is. And I think from a leadership perspective, if you really fucking care, and you can find people that really care, and you have something that is special to you, it doesn't need to be special to the world, and then you can communicate that day in and day out with a very clear and consistent message, you can start to build a culture around that.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

Yeah. The other thing I keep thinking about is everybody who was like, Well, it's if you can make it in your f your kitchen, then why doesn't everybody just do it?

SPEAKER_01 19:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

And at first I used to get pissed.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

It's like, go try and make it yourself, bitch.

SPEAKER_00 19:40

You can't and I would and I would just think about all we're doing is something good, and these people are hating for some reason. I and I and I wouldn't get it. Haters hate. Haters do hate. And then all of a sudden, Tessie Mays goes from like, oh, cute little one whole foods, to the number one selling salad dressing in North America. And then every single hater was like, oh my god, the balsamic. How did you do that? It's all I eat. And I would say, Well, why don't you just make it yourself? And they were like, Well, we didn't think it was actually gonna work. Do you know how hard it is? And I'm like, it we we you never can well. This is the number one thing I think from a cultural standpoint that we live and die by, that we almost forced everybody to um live into. It's if not us who we have every opportunity to create a brand like anybody else can. Anybody. And so we truly believe that then, we truly believe that now. We're definitely smarter now and have more experience, but it's very hard to keep the belief. And it's very hard to keep hope, especially when you know you're competing with the largest manufacturers in the world, and you don't have the money, you don't have the expertise, you don't have the team, and yet uh you give these buyers and these retailers and these consumers this hope that they're telling you what to do.

SPEAKER_01 21:11

Well, and it's the same messaging. We we lit we lived and reinforced the same uh communication strategy around uh belief, uh clean eating, great tasting, no barriers to purchase, the American dream. And we just did that over and over and over again for 16 years. And I I think another thing which is interesting when I think about it, going back and looking, we said the same shit over and over and over again. Yeah. And I think people overly complicate it and then they don't stick to their guns. Where if you know a bunch of haters. Are you saying something sucks, maybe they change it? And I'll use my magnificent C-League basketball team for my daughter. Okay? We have only lost one game. I identified their strengths and weaknesses. They're ruthless competitors that are not good at basketball. And so I say, girls, here's what we're doing. We are going to be physically fit. We're going to be really good at D and we're going to shoot a thousand times a game. Something's going to go in. God's on our side. Okay? I don't need you to master the three-point. All I want you to do is stay positive and keep shooting. Because if we're really fit and we're really good at D, all I need you to do is keep stealing the ball, go down, pass to the open person, and shoot. I don't give a shit if it goes in because we're going to get it back on D. And so after every quarter, I just say the same stuff. Are we physically fit? Yes. Do these girls work as hard, hard as us? No. Can we run them into the ground? Yes. Are you going to get yelled at for shooting? No. Keep fucking doing it. And we just keep doing it. And when I think about brands and businesses, we had nobody can make this product like we can. Nobody cares more than we care. And we're focused on building the next great brand and we're focused on growth. And we want to share the success. And I also think that that was a big part, which was like we weren't trying to keep it all for ourselves. It was a blank slate where if you wanted to own a piece of the business, we had a metric system of how you could do it. Here is your job. This is where you fit in the world. Here are the metrics. If you hit this metric, you will get this much stock or a bonus or whatever. You choose. It's your call. And so everybody was vested in the overall success of the business. Now, not everybody cared about that. Remember when we gave every like the entire warehouse team stock? They were like, Can I cash this in? Mo, do you remember that? We had that big ass ceremony.

unknown 24:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:37

And we like and everybody, we handed out everybody's stock, and they didn't give a single fuck. Yeah, they're like, can we trade trade this in for a day? I want cash, bro. I'm like, this is better than cash. This is stock. They're like, I don't give a shit at all.

SPEAKER_00 25:00

Dude.

SPEAKER_01 25:00

But again, it was like, all right, well, I guess we're not doing that again. It was still available for everybody. Uh, but it was funny about like expectations and giving something that you think people want versus what they actually want.

SPEAKER_00 25:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:16

And some people just want the cash, they don't want the stock. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 25:19

And I guess thinking about the people who couldn't let their guard down, and they had to sign the core values as a part of their employment agreement. And so when we would talk to them, we'd be like, hey man, you're really good at your job, but you're horrible to be around.

SPEAKER_01 25:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:41

And the you have to kind of be this whole thing. You don't have to be all happy go lucky like Greg and I. Um, but you do have to be positive and you do have to believe. And so I thought that was always funny when people thought we were joking, and then they effectively would fire themselves. Yeah. Remember that? Um, so that was kind of a crazy one. And then I think just not taking yourself too serious, which we never did. Like we went to every single meeting, right? We've effectively broke the company up into thirds. It's like you were front facing investors, community, employees. I was retailers and brokers, sales guys. Matt was manufacturing. And so I'd run into a guy at a trade show and he's like, dude, blah, blah, blah, from so-and-so. I'm like, I'm sorry, I have no idea who you are. He's like, I I I do all your olive oil. I'm like, oh, you're Matt's boy. And he's like, Yeah. I'm like, yeah, we we we we kind of silo ourselves out so we can be fully submersed in that respective lane. And that was also cool, too, because you could kind of not know there was a dumpster fire going on with lemon juice or garlic, or an investor, or a retailer telling us they're gonna cut our facings or whatever. So um I think that's also super important. It's like you know enough to be dangerous, but if you don't need to be in a meeting for supply chain, go do something useful. And then the other thing that I think caught a lot of the classically trained PG guys or the Coca-Cola guys that we worked with, it was they had to be busy 10 hours a day, six days a week.

SPEAKER_01 27:32

Yeah, check in, check out.

SPEAKER_00 27:34

Yeah, and we were end result driven. It was like clock in, clock out. It's like, guys, once your job is done for the day, for the week, for the month, I don't care what you do. And then a lot of them just couldn't wrap their heads around that. And people still can't. Well, I just don't know what you would do if you're done.

SPEAKER_01 27:53

Well, it's Colin Powell's busy bastard concept where it's like list out your day as a part of the plan. When that's done, leave. Because this is a long, hard fucking journey. And you being around when you're already done for the day, not recharging your battery for the next day, distracting other people within your organization because you think I care if you're here until five, six, seven o'clock at night. All you're doing is being the most inefficient human being on the planet. Yeah. It's that funny ass story where the American businessman went to like Switzerland or something. Did you ever hear that? No. So guy gets moved over to Switzerland, first one in, stays late every day, works on the weekends, you know, moves over there, thinks he's dominating. Everybody leaves at three or four in the afternoon. Nobody works on the weekends, no one's replying to emails. So they do his 90-day review and they're like, you're fired. And he's like, What are you talking about? They go, You, it appears, are the dumbest human being that's ever lived because it takes you four times the amount of time to get something done that it takes us to do in you know, a couple days within reasonable business hours. And we really just can't deal with this. I mean, you're you're obviously incompetent. Right. You know, and he takes the flight home and he's just like sitting there going, Oh my god, I thought they cared like they do in America. Right. And in reality, I mean, you do still see stuff like that where it's like you gotta show up here, you leave at this time, and I don't care if you have anything to do, but you better fucking be here. I hate that. Yeah, no, I'm I'm a uh metrics guy, end result guy. If you can do something, which is that hilarious Picasso story, some woman comes up to him in a coffee shop. Can you draw something on this napkin for me? He's like, Absolutely. So he draws something. She goes, How much I'll pay you anything? And he's like, That'll be$30,000. And she's like, That took you 30 seconds. He goes, No, my dear, that took me 30 years. And she was like, What the fuck?

SPEAKER_00 30:31

The other culture piece that we pulled off a ton of very fast major milestones in a short amount of time.

SPEAKER_01 30:40

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 30:42

And we joked when we were like, All right, how are we gonna compete with these big guys? Contrary to the Swiss story. It's like, all right, we need to treat our hour like a normal person treats a day. Our day then becomes a week, a week's a month, a month's a quarter, so on and so forth. And then we effectively were like, well, in three years, we could be a 10-year-old brand if we live into that all day, every day. And so we did that. Um it's unbelievable what you can pull off when you have multiple people living that same lifestyle, and you can kind of like pull from the front, too, right? You don't you don't always have to push your people up, you don't always have to hope everybody's gonna have this perfect strategy, but you do have to weed out the week.

SPEAKER_01 31:27

You gotta have a culture that believes in executing at the highest level.

SPEAKER_00 31:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:34

And well, in our book club, yeah, that would break people.

SPEAKER_00 31:37

The Tessie Mays Library. That was that broke most. They're like, I'm not doing a book report. I'm like, well, you have to read a book a month. Yep. Book report how this book applied to you, yep, how this book applied to the world, how this book applied to the business. Yep. For 12 months was level one.

SPEAKER_01 31:59

And then you got bonused off of it too.

SPEAKER_00 32:02

Yeah. And it was that was the hardest thing I think we had to do is to convince these people that there's more for you out there. And I was like, look, I had to do this, these books in seven days. Well, this is the greatest story ever.

SPEAKER_01 32:18

You're a couple weeks in. I give you Think and Grow Rich, and I say, You need to have this done in seven days. You are not getting it done, and you need a different global perspective on the world, and these books are gonna help you do it. And you go, Yeah, man, I I'm more like two, two or three pages an hour type of guy. Yeah. And I said, dude, if you don't have this fucking book done, and you can do the audiobook, this is about information in, yeah, not reading comprehension, you got seven days. And if that shit's not done in seven days, we're not working together anymore. Right. And you fucking went on the entire Tessie Mays library one a week. I mean, there was probably the first batch was probably 20 books. Yeah. 20 weeks, 20 books. And you just fucking cranked those things out, and each book gave a completely different perspective on the world, and then we really haven't stopped learning at that pace. But again, going back to building a culture, we needed people to understand the same things that we understood, and so it was like, you're gonna read these books. I don't care what the book report says, you can say you fucking hated this book and you think it's completely dumb, and it was a total waste of your time. You're gonna read it, and I'll never forget the difference. There was one woman in supply chain and her book report on Think and Grow Rich was her basically saying, Fuck this, fuck Napoleon Hill. I don't believe in setting goals, I don't believe any of this is possible, I don't believe in writing your goals down, and gave like all these intellectual answers why none of that was real or possible. And I read it and I'm like, the probability of this person working out in this culture is really, really low. And again, we didn't fire her on the spot, but I've never seen such a massive indicator of this person's going to fail, which she then eventually did a month later, right, versus another guy, super low level, entry-level guy, give him a different book, and his book report was so deep and so profound, and I read this and I go, This motherfucker is gonna move up quick, and he did. And so this culture around the pursuit of the American dream, leading by example, fish rots from the head down, caught, not taught, however you want to think about it, and then the constant, ruthless discipline of consistent communication day in and day out within a framework that you actually live by, i.e., our core values. I think in any business we've been in, we've re-implemented a variation of that, and it works. Because at the end of the day, when you really boil it down, positive energy is contagious. And if you're fucking hyped on meat packing, on concrete, on plumbing, on porta potties. Another great example. Let's get into that for a second. I mean, you want to talk about something dumber than fucking salad dressing, porta potties. How do you build a culture around probably one of the worst jobs in America, which is sucking shit out of plastic containers at festivals and on job sites? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:55

That's currently frozen. Right.

SPEAKER_01 36:58

And what you do for that, and this was the this was the same exercise. How do we make something this dumb interesting? Really, really fun branding and marketing. Because the job sucks. That job sucks. Right. So what we can do to make that job suck less, really funny branding, really funny marketing, really good gear, and then treating people with respect. And if you combine that, you've got a culture for something that sucks, but now it's funny and interesting. And so all the videos that Mo and Matt and we all created, the job sites are now. I saw the new Marty video, dude. That was hilarious what you did. And it's a little ray of sunshine and an otherwise very kind of gray and shitty day, pun intended. But that's how you gotta do it with businesses that are not quote unquote sexy, which I'm not really sure what is sexy, and I'm I'm like thinking right now. It's like everything is hard. Making clothes visually sexy, the labor behind it horrible. Yeah. Same with shoes, visually sexy, construction, horrible. And you could go through any business, it's all difficult. And I don't know if you know, when I really think about it, it's like the only thing that's like really fun and sexy would be like the business you just sold. Looking back. Yeah, that's the only thing I can think about. Yeah, with rose-colored glasses of that was just the best business.

SPEAKER_00 39:10

Maybe we'll find one of those one day. Yeah, I'm I've never met anyone who has one of those. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 39:16

And I don't know anyone because I do think everybody has like their own bullshit. Yeah. You know, if you're just a people business, let's let's talk about like a marketing agency, then you're dealing with very precious creative people that are fragile. That sounds like a fucking nightmare. Pro athletes. I mean, the grind behind that hard and randomly rich overnight. Yep. I mean, that culture's tough having to deal with that. Now, again, to the fans, unbelievable. So sexy, so cool. They don't understand the discipline. So I think it is interesting that the conversation as a whole is centered around, you know, I have a non-sexy business, I'm trying to like build a culture that's cool. I think it's you gotta lead by example, you gotta be passionate about it, core values gotta be there, positive energy and vibes have to be there. I think work environment is important. We made that manufacturing plant fucking dope.

SPEAKER_00 40:36

Yeah, people would want to come tour it, and we were always like, Are you sure? Like, dude, we saw the pictures on Instagram or whatever, that's so cool. I think the other thing that's very important about culture is how old is your business and how do you treat your business? Right? So with Woodall and Tushies, he's like, Man, I got all these great ideas. Like, I want to do boom, boom, boom. I'm like, what all remember? We have a two-year-old baby showing a lot of promise, still in a diaper, still sleeps in a crib. Right. And we have been in business for 16, 17 years. We just got our driver's license, and we can now have our homies drive in the front seat all the time. Right? It's like, so we're still building our muscles as we're growing growing too. And it's always funny to see kind of that twinkle in his eye kind of be like, all right, I am being too hard on myself. We are still figuring this thing out. And when you talk to customers, I think that's the biggest thing. It's like, all right, guys, like all we're gonna do with these porta potty things is make them uh cleaner and a little bit funnier, but we're only gonna be a year old. So, like, coach us up, give us harsh feedback if we need it. Also, feel free to say nice things, up to you, right? And they usually don't get too engaged because everything is such big business post-COVID and post-consolidation of everything. And so I think it's cool where people get a piece of ownership. Uh, if you're willing to learn from your customers and open that door and be transparent, you really get pulled along with the growth, but from dumpsters to cement washout to all these opportunities we have. It was just because we were like, yeah, we'll do the worst thing possible for you, which is service your porta potties, and we're only a year old, so please help us help you by building this together. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 42:33

If you were to go into a random business as like a brand and culture consultant, what do you think the most important thing, the first thing that you would do to like a non-sexy business that has walls that look and conference rooms that look like you're in a prison cell? I would go into the bathroom.

SPEAKER_00 43:00

And and then I would go into the break room. And then usually from there, you you kind of know how everybody treats where they use the like everybody goes to the bathroom and everybody eats. Not everybody works in the mechanic shop, not everybody works in production. And so I think if you can find common ground and really start to see what the cultures, is there paper on the ground? Yes or no? Um, is there soap? Is it nice soap, right? You can kind of catch a pretty specific vibe. Is it folgers? Is it counterculture? You know, are there plastic cups? Are there mugs? Like all these little things. Because we've been to some really cool big businesses, and you're like, oh, your business is big, is because you just care about everything. Everything is just well done. It doesn't need to be perfect, it doesn't need to be the best. Of the best, it's just like make it tidy, make it neat, rinse, repeat the next day. So that's what I would do probably.

SPEAKER_01 44:08

What if somebody is asking you to help improve like the general energy of the business? What would you implement for them?

SPEAKER_00 44:22

Oh, well, I I generally need to catch a vibe, so I would go just watch for a little bit and see what the deal is. And I think most of the time people are very formal for no reason. And they have work life and they have home life. And I don't think it needs to be that extreme. And I think there's a lot of fear in cultures versus joy and love. And so I'm a vibe guy and I'm a surroundings guy. And so one thing I do know to be true is nobody goes to Malibu in February and it's like, mmm, perfect weather, hate this, right? Everyone's like, this is the greatest place on planet. It's warm, smells good, the sun's out, you know, who cares what the people are like there, right? We're just talking about the vibe, okay? Uh, but then if you're in February and you go to Minnesota. Minnesota. Minnesota, nicest people ever, freezing, gray, cold. So you you almost have to create these counters um to kind of engage like a baseline of like productivity. Because if you're efficient and you do a good job, then there's happiness, and then if there's happiness, there's growth, and then you kind of just build from there, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_01 45:59

Yeah, I think um little things are important for sure. If you were to go into the original Tessie May's tree fort, we always had upbeat music in the lobby. Colors were unbelievably bright, core values were framed on the wall. Quote wall right when you walk in, where anybody could write their favorite quote. Every office was painted beautifully. I don't know who we had do it, but they did a good job. Shout out to GoGo. Um break room was super lit. And we took over a plant, I think it was the Chesapeake Bay Crab Cake Company or something. And that place looked like a fucking prison. It smelled like a prison. It was around brown, disgusting carpet. Halfway up the wall. Halfway up the wall. The break room looked like that's where people went to get killed. I mean, the whole thing was a total shit show. And so imagining having to go in there and then work for eight to twelve hours a day. I mean, you want to talk about not being positive. Um I loved the the fucking ping pong matches we had in the break room, TV was on, awesome coffee. You know, we just we built something that we would enjoy working at. And I think if you really boil it down, it is this thing of you work backwards from wow. Like, okay, with clear eyes and a full heart, you can't lose. Can't lose. But with clear eyes, walk into your business today, like you're a customer or uh prospective employee. What sucks? You walk in, is there a broken tile? Is are the walls disgusting? What does it sound like? What does it smell like? What are the people like when you walk in? Because that's what all of your employees experience every fucking day. And then I think you kind of build from there, but the first thing, lay out what you believe. Right? Like if you're doing concrete, why are you in concrete? If you're in meat packing, why are you in meat packing? We have a produce business that is a fucking hard, aggressive, very efficient business. We try and make it beautiful, we try and make it as nice as it can be for that type of refrigerated, freezing cold kind of manufacturing space. And it's the little stuff that will build and compound on itself. And then it just comes back, I guess, to the consistent communication of what are we fighting for? Because that is what gets lost. We also did a great job from just a general State of the Union communication newsletter for everybody that was working abroad. Like, hey guys, every in the beginning, it was every other week. We'll have everybody there. Anybody can ask me any question they want about anything in the world. And that was helpful. Then when times got tough, we did it every week. Yep. And that was really helpful. And then the weekly newsletter was really helpful. And we had a spotlight of an employee and an of a win, and we just did all of this stuff that let people know and reminded them why are we fighting the good fight? Because when you're alone or shit starts getting hard, that old saying, uh, fatigue makes a coward of us all. It doesn't have to be physical fatigue, it can be fucking mental fatigue.

SPEAKER_00 50:30

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 50:31

Of I am so fucking tired of dealing with this bullshit. Yeah. And if you haven't talked or had a conversation with the leader who's the main source of energy, now in theory, this goes back to hiring. You gotta hire the right people that are all communicating the same thing down the way. Um, so this shouldn't be a problem. Now no one does that. Right. So you gotta figure out a way to get your voice injected into these people's souls so that they kind of they get reminded why am I fighting this fight? Why am I driving to fucking Essex, Maryland? Why am I in Gonzalez, California? Why am I sucking shit out of plastic containers? Why am I doing this? Why am I doing that? And the answers should be honest, too.

SPEAKER_00 51:32

Yeah, there's no doubt. The the other one that I keep thinking about, and I brought this up in uh at YPO the other day, is the three sets of eight. Eight hours for sleep, eight hours for work, eight hours for you. The other eight. The other eight. And they asked me, like, how do I break up my eight these days, my other eight? And it was funny because it changes every couple years, and with four kids, I'm basically my other eight is thirds now. Brian gets a third, Claire gets a third, and then the four kids get a third amongst all the other stuff they get. And it was really interesting. Most people just go to sleep, they wake up, they don't look at what 24 hours could be. And because our dreams have always been so big, we've had to be really efficient with our time, and we're not willing to give up our health and wellness for money. We're not willing to do work that's meaningless to us without the ability to be, you know, put some joy into the world. And so I think at the end of the day, from a cultural perspective, go meet these people in the wild. You know, remember we we used to ask people to see their car when they would come in for an interview. Yes. And nine out of ten had all these excuses as to why it wasn't right, clean. Yeah, clean or or whatever. And, you know, a part of me gets that, right? But a part of me too was I wish people would have been like, bro, I got six kids. Wait till you have two and come look at my car. And I wish people had that, but I learned a lot from that. And so when my car is a mess on a Sunday after a weekend full of sports and we're trying to get ready for the day, I look at it like, yes, this car needs to be clean because no human can fit in it anymore with as much shit as in it. But at the same time, I don't like glitch anymore because it's a mess. I like the mess, I think it's fine. And um I think you just have to be proud of where you are in your stages of life. And if you are, then you can authentically be proud of other people and you can be happy for their, oh, I'm getting married. Amazing. Because at the beginning of Tessie Mays, we were so committed and such hard chargers. There was no world outside of us winning. And so I don't regret that because that's the effort it took. Um, and I'm glad we can put on blinders and bring the thunder like we do. But I also think that after a certain amount of time, you don't need to be that intense all the time, but you also have to win first to reevaluate and then win again to reevaluate. And so I think from a cultural standpoint, what I'm always happy is I get to keep bringing these business wins and losses to the to the next venture we do. And if there's one thing I can guarantee is I'm gonna get the yes, no matter what industry we're in, because we're gonna curate this story together and with others that so authentically us, we've already kind of pitched this dream, sold the story, and then when we go pitch people, it's more of like a yo dog, I got an idea. Yeah, now it's not real yet, but walk me through it, you know? So I think that's what I got.

SPEAKER_01 55:05

Yeah. And I would also say just um going back to like easy little things, gear. You know, if you're building a culture or you're trying to from nothing, people love fucking gear. Yeah. And Tushis is a great example of that. We came up with the funniest phone number ever, 855 P poop. We put it on everything, we had a beautiful logo, the colors are bright and crazy. We made the sweatshirt look almost like a Bale Bond sweatshirt, and people fucking love it.

SPEAKER_00 55:50

Dude, we have our friends' kids getting kicked out of school because they won't take their Tushies hoodie off. Yeah. It's like you can't have a sweatshirt that says pee and poop on it, and so they're like, Well, kick us out because we ain't taking it off.

SPEAKER_01 56:05

But you think about again, you you're trying to build something, and it's like people like nice shit, and they like stuff that looks good.

SPEAKER_00 56:17

Speaking of that, uh Louie and Jeff are swap boys. They saw the new Pemberton Carhartt, and they were like, yo, tell your brother, let me get some.

SPEAKER_01 56:27

Yeah, I got you. I got you. I need I need like a coin or something, so if I get pulled over, I can whip out some official shit. You know, I need like I need like a little car that's like I'm with the guys. Badge number, please. Yeah, yeah. Oh, right here. Yeah. I'm sorry about that. Call my call my team. Yeah. Uh I will get those for our swap boys. Um, but again, it's little stuff. I think it's like interesting. The bathroom and the and the eating room absolutely agree. But it is compounded, you work backwards from WoW and you go, all right, if I'm trying to make this the best company ever and build a culture around that, I gotta have all of these pillars, and then I gotta live into them.

SPEAKER_00 57:20

Yeah, if and if you don't love it as the leader, uh, and if you don't love it as the lowest level employee, the kink in the armor spreads. Everybody's always looking for an out. Yeah. Or they're looking to be all the way in. Yep. And so if you give them the out, they take it. If you give them the chance to be all in and not be embarrassed, um I think that is so cool because to the point of the story with the book reports, the person you want to be great, and then gives this half-ass report that's a day or two late with a bunch of excuses, and then this random intern who just crushes it and is a week early, let me get another one so I can go faster. It's I think it's a way just to kind of peek into someone's life and say, like, what's in that belly of yours? Like, where's the fight?

SPEAKER_01 58:18

And it goes back to sports. I mean, we basically ran it like an elite sports team. Yeah. And if you are a wide receiver and you drop the ball every time someone throws it to you, you're gonna be fucking cut. If you're a walk-on who catches anything that gets thrown to them, you're going to get more and more and more opportunities. And so you have to create an environment where you have these little tests where you can see who actually wants it and who doesn't, and then you build your culture around them.

SPEAKER_00 58:53

And it's and it's funny, like people take winning as positive and losing as negative.

SPEAKER_01 58:59

Generally speaking, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 59:00

Yeah. Generally speaking, that's just I don't, we won, oh, we lost. And I think what's funny as we're raising athletes and kids, and the wins and the losses are the same thing. It's just feedback and it's just data. And so if you can give people space to lose and then to communicate and then to speak out loud and to be embarrassed and to be pissed, all of those raw emotions, then all of a sudden, they almost proactively bring you, hey, dude, if we don't do this very specific thing, I know we don't have the budget for it, but if we close this deal, we will have the budget for it. Can we do this? Then you just ask them the question Do you actually believe this will work? Yeah. Yes, go. But if you don't have a culture where it's like every single dollar is this and figure it out from there, you're just kind of everybody else then. And there's a point in time, I'm sure, when you have a massive company where you're the whole thing. I've never been a part of that, nor do I ever want to. Yep. But I think there's a lot of very simple things people can do around culture, but it's gotta be grounded in authenticity, has to be grounded in effort, and it has to be grounded in fun. Because if you're not spreading joy, the big guys are already out here spreading no joy. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:24

100%. All right. This was the Greg Vetter Podcast, Brian Vetter part two. Probably more to come. Uh, thank you for coming.