Transcript: Boosting Business Success and Revenue through a Flourishing Workplace Culture // Brad Carr, Jordan Newton, SonicAire

Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast

“Boosting Business Success and Revenue through a Flourishing Workplace Culture“

July 15, 2024

Encore Episode: Brad Carr and Jordan Newton

Intro: Welcome to this special summer encore of the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast. So, let me ask, what difference does having a flourishing culture make for a leader, for employees, for those you serve, and for your customers, even the bottom line? Well, today's guests describe the transformation from their unhealthy culture to a flourishing culture like going from hell to heaven. Well, listen in. I promise you'll love to hear their story.

Welcome: Welcome to the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, your home for open, honest, and insightful conversations to help develop your leadership, your team, and build a flourishing workplace culture.

Al Lopus: Hello, I'm Al Lopus, the co-founder of the Best Christian Workplaces and author of the book Road to Flourishing. And I'm passionate about helping Christian leaders like you create engaged, flourishing workplaces.

Well, today on the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast we’re going to consider how a flourishing culture is not only good for your employees, it's also good for the health of your business. The investment that you make in inspirational leadership, sustainable strategy, and employee training and development make a difference in the quality of your products and services. It's good for your people, and it's good for business.

I'm delighted to welcome Brad Carr and Jordan Newton to the podcast today. Brad’s the president and founder of SonicAire, and Jordan is the chief operating officer. And their company provides fan systems to deal with combustible dust in industrial settings.

Hello, Brad and Jordan. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Brad Carr: Thanks, Al, for inviting us to join you today. Hopefully, something we say will encourage another leader to create their own flourishing culture.

Jordan Newton: Thanks for having us, Al.

Al: Yeah, great. Well, I'm looking forward, Brad, as you say, I believe that this will encourage leaders to create a flourishing workplace culture. And I get the question, why do I want to have a flourishing culture? Is there a return on that investment? And we'll talk about that as we go through this podcast.

Well, Jordan, let's start off with you. We did a podcast a few years ago, and Brad, we're delighted to welcome you today. So let's start with two of you as senior leaders at SonicAire, and talk about how you work together for employee engagement and how you've helped to create a flourishing workplace. You're setting the tone for workplace culture from the top of the organization. Now, I also understand from Cary Humphries, our BCW consulting director, that, Brad, you're the visionary, and Jordan, you're the integrator. And those are terms that you've used. But let's start with the question, so how do your strengths complement each other as you lead your staff team? And how do you give each other space to really fully work within your strengths and your roles? Brad, let's start with you.

Brad: Well, first I got to tell you that the concept of visionary and integrator was not even in my vocabulary until we went through implementing EOS. I always thought of myself as a good manager, maybe not so much as an entrepreneur or a visionary, but certainly as an entrepreneur, but I was totally wrong on the management part, which really falls to the integrator.

Another piece of the puzzle really helped us was called a Kolbe assessment, which is kind of, you know, how your inclined to do things, breaks it into four areas. I found that what I was really strong at was quick start. Like, nine out of ten. I can make a decision pretty quick. And what I was weak at was really the management and the hands-on side of it. And as it would work out, Jordan was, like, the opposite of me. And we had worked together for years before we did this, and I would frustrate Jordan to death because I had a new idea about every day that I wanted to do, and Jordan was trying to get things organized and predictable and running in an orderly fashion. And I did find out that whenever I was into a lot of the management things, it just drained energy from me because I really wanted to do more of the creative side.

But I would say in terms of our relationship, I would say it's more like a dance than a walk in the park, and we've really had to learn how to do it. It takes a whole lot of trust to do that. I mean, we ended up here because we had a culture that was in dire need of structure is how we actually ended up here. And I wanted that. I just didn’t realize I was not the one that could do it. And by God's grace, I found out that Jordan was perfectly suited for that. But as the visionary, I'm kind of the disruptor. I don't mean to do that. I just got all these ideas, and so it's how do you harness them without disturbing the processes from going on like they are?

But I got to say, I love being the visionary. That's really all I do now. It's really the gifts that God has given me is this creativity. And then, I just trust Jordan to do the integrator part, of which he does an excellent job.

Al: You know, and Brad, you mentioned EOS. That's the entrepreneurial operating system, kind of, there's a series of books including Traction. I know that a number of organizations are implementing that. And I love the way they talk about the visionary and integrator.

I don't know. Jordan, how about you? Do you have anything to add to what Brad started off with?

Jordan: Well, people have asked me for years, how is it possible that you and Brad work so well together? And before I'd ever heard of that visionary-integrator-title thing, I would just have to explain to people that Brad's the big-idea guy, and I'm just the guy that figures out what size nuts and bolts we're going to need to build whatever big idea he's coming up with. And so we have always played well together in that aspect.

Al: Yeah, and that's worked well together. You need both, don't you?

Brad: Absolutely.

Al: Well, you've been doing the Best Christian Workplace Engagement Survey since 2016. And, you know, as I look back at some of those early Survey results, you've had impressive change and improvement and growth in your employee engagement, now to a place where you're a flourishing workplace. And one area that's clear from the data is that you have tremendous leaders who are open, honest, and humble. So how do you hire and train to get this kind of leadership in your department or even down in your middle-manager levels? Jordan, how do you do that?

Jordan: Well, as shown by our early Survey results, we did it very poorly in the early days. When we were younger, we'd hire a lot based on skill set and just try to determine if a candidate seemed like a nice person. And we really didn't have anything else to go on at that point. And it wasn't until we identified our core values, who we are, who we want to be, and began to filter through that kind of lens that we began to see a shift in our leadership and management.

Al: Yeah. And as oftentimes as I think about, how can organizations transition to move to flourishing? having those core values is really a key.

Brad, follow up a little bit with that, and maybe even describe what some of those core values are.

Brad: Yeah. I'd say overall hiring character before talent is really what changed. We do this by assessing a person's character being in alignment with our core values, which, basically, it's four core values: humble, hungry, people smart, and grateful. We always have multiple leaders. We'll interview. We’ll sometimes coordinate questions from different angles. But, you know, we find it's easier to find talent than it is to find character. So the right character, we feel like talent can be trained to a great extent. I believe personally, I believe that only God can change character, so I'm not going to try to do that. I will help change their ability to perform their talent.

And we maintain these core values in our culture by emphasizing them in each of our quarterly corporate state-of-the-business meetings. Plus, we have a quarterly conversation with each of our employees, between employees and their supervisors. And in all of those, we always review the four core values from both the supervisor and the employee’s perspective on how are they measuring up. So our current experience is that if someone starts slipping on the core values, that their peers will be the first ones to talk to them, which is so much better than having to have a manager come in and talk to someone. So people love it, they love the culture, and they kind of protect the culture.

Al: Yeah. I love that. So quarterly reviews where, again, the values are discussed, but, also, you have got quarterly all-staff meetings. Yeah.

You know, Brad, when we started working together in 2016, the health of your culture was on the bottom 10% of our database of Christian-led companies. Now your culture is close to the top 10% of companies in our database, and we've got a lot more companies in our database now than we did in 2017 or ’18, when you started. So that's a huge improvement. And our listeners, let me just say that's a significant—that's rare.

So accept, first of all, my heartfelt congratulations, and I want to thank you both for your leadership, which leads me to ask three questions. First, I'm always interested to know, describe how your employees’ experience working at SonicAire today versus what it was back in 2016. What's the difference? And secondly, for our listeners who are on the same boat that you were five or six years ago, what were some of the key processes that you implemented to give you traction on this road to flourishing? And third, I know you're a member of a C12 group, and you care about your Christian witness, so how has that changed with your employees, customers, even your community? Do you see an impact of your improved culture on your Christian witness? So, interested in your thoughts, Brad, you know, as the visionary founder.

Brad: I think it varies by the position the person was in at the time. But I can tell you, as far as top leadership is concerned, we've gone from hell to heaven. You know, Sunday evenings were the worst evenings of the week because you had Monday mornings right after that. We went through that for, I guess, three or four years, it seemed like, until we finally got out on the other end.

An answer to the second question is, in 2016, when we started this, we basically had two leaders that wanted to go one direction—that was Jordan and I—and four leaders that wanted to go a different direction, not all in the same direction. And it really took us a couple of years to figure that out. A couple of people we had to let go, and a couple of people let themselves go. It all begins with leadership. If the top leadership is not in alignment, it's not going to happen. And sometimes that alignment, it isn't because you got bad people or people want to go bad places. It's just, they don't want to go to the same place.

Again, EOS helped us out a lot there, with the right person in the right seats and figuring all that out. And once we got through that and we replaced people on the leadership team, I look forward to coming to work. And I particularly look forward to working with everybody else in leadership or anywhere because we are going in the same direction. We're communicating and very open about things.

And I guess the answer to the third one, we wanted SonicAire, basically, to be a culture that's friendly for the Gospel to flourish, not running any evangelistic outreach particularly, because we want it to be every individual, that they can talk about Jesus and what He means to them, and, you know, really that it could be real. And I think that's particularly important today because particularly a lot of the younger employees no longer go to church. Like, when I was a kid, everybody went to church, whether you needed it or not. And there's a lot of skepticism. And I think they've got to see the Gospel lived as much as spoken before they can ever hear. And I really think we have kind of a petri dish that enables that culture to grow.

Al: Yeah. Yeah, that's great, Brad. Well, I love your comment there, “It's gone from hell to heaven,” and you could put a lot of thought about that difference. And you like to come to work on Monday morning. I've heard that over and over again from leaders. I mean, and you're the founder, you're the president of the organization, and that's how you felt. So, yeah, what a change. What a change.

Jordan, how about you?

Jordan: Yeah, I would agree. A lot has changed since 2016, and to be honest, I wouldn't still be here today if we were still headed down that same path we were back then. It's a night-and-day difference. And just to add kind of to what Brad was saying about the right people in the right seats, you know, I came to SonicAire from a pretty large corporation, and I guess you could say corporate America, and had some preconceived notion that a small company with “good Christian people” should have minimal conflict. And boy, was I wrong. I couldn’t have been further from the truth.

And like Brad said, it doesn't mean we had bad people, but we had different objectives, different visions for what we were trying to accomplish. And once we came to the realization that for us to have some sense of peace and harmony in the workplace, that we had to have alignment, then the puzzle pieces started to fit into place. And the ones that didn't or couldn't fit into our puzzle could move on and find the puzzle where they really did fit. So it was quite the paradigm shift for me when I finally recognized that just because people are Christians doesn't necessarily mean we should all be working together in the same workplace. And so if I can offer any encouragement to someone that's at the beginning of this journey, it would just be to say that it's okay to acknowledge that some people may be better suited for another organization. It doesn't mean they're bad people, but it might mean that they're just not right for your organization. And the right people are out there; you just have to go find them.

Al: Great advice.

I trust you’re enjoying our podcast today. We’ll be right back after an important word for leaders.

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Al: Welcome back to Brad and Jordan.

Your workplace has goal clarity. We're able to see that from your Engagement Survey results. People like your company, and they feel like you all meet your goals. So how do you go about setting goals for your teams? You want people to be stretching and growing through their goals, but not discouraged by having goals that are too ambitious. So tell us a little bit about how you go about goal setting in your organization. Brad, how about you?

Brad: Well, from my perspective, we break down what we call our BHAG—big, hairy, audacious goal—into quarterly rocks, 90 days, you know, whether they’re projects, whatever they are, and we try to set them smart so that we know we can attain them. And then, we have a rhythm, where every week we meet and we talk about various things. But one of the things that we do every week is evaluate, are you on target or not on target for your rock? And if you're not on target, then do we need to identify, discuss, and solve it? What can we do to help you get there?

And it really requires, I think, if someone gets stuck, one of our core values is humility, so necessary because if someone doesn’t have that character mistake, they don't want to admit that they're failing or that they've got issues. But the truth of it is we've all got issues from time to time. Our target is to make 80% of our rocks. We don't always hit that. We know sometimes we won't because sometimes it's not a smart rock, or a lot of our rocks involve other people. We can’t always control that. But it is something that we do it every quarter. We set these different rocks for things we want, a goal we want to achieve, and then we measure it as we go along.

Al: Yeah. Again, it's just a wonderful thing to see how your people are really aligned with your goals, and they feel like you're achieving your goals.

Jordan: Yeah. We take those goals, and we state them at that quarterly meeting Brad was talking about. We break them down departmentally for the ones that are departmental specific. And then, when we set these goals or these rocks, we are shooting for that 80%, just like Brad talked about. If we're hitting 100% of them, we're probably not reaching far enough. We probably need to stretch a little bit farther and set some more aggressive goals—“A” for aggressive. But if it's less than 80%, we try to reassess and learn what we can do better the next quarter to manage our workload and make sure we still are moving forward and getting some traction on those goals. You know, sometimes even if it doesn't get complete, it was worth the effort to get it 80% this quarter so that we can get it the last 20% the next quarter.

Al: Yeah. And as you say, you look at those every week. The accountability that's part of this EOS program is remarkable. We at Best Christian Workplaces implemented EOS a couple of years ago, and it's been a very effective process for us.

But another thing, as I look at your results, your workers really believe in your product. They believe in the quality, and they really believe in what you provide your customers. And it shows a lot of confidence in the company and the products that you produce. So that enthusiasm for what you provide really must impact your customers as well. So, Jordan, how do you see your investment in your workers and in quality paying off in the marketplace?

Jordan: Well, our fan, you know, that's our product. That's what we make is a fan. And it's used for dust control in industrial factories. And a lot of people don't realize it, but many types of dust can actually explode. So the purpose of our product is to create a safer, healthier, and more-efficient work environment. And our people get that. They see the purpose behind what we do and that their work matters. They're not just processing invoices or strapping boxes to a pallet or bolting on fan blades; they really are creating a better work environment for others around the world. And when you can create a workplace where people want to be at and they understand the mission, it's kind of magical. They care about the quality of their work. They know that their coworkers depend on them, and they hold each other accountable to the same standards. And they want to ensure that our customers get a premium result and have a partner for life. Their passion for our customers is really the fuel in our rocket ship.

Al: Yeah. Well, that's a great story. And you're providing what we call life-giving work. I mean, because they understand what you're doing, that gives them a sense of meaning and purpose for their work, and it really draws them. It creates an emotional connection with what you're doing. As you say, you create safer, healthier work environments for others. So your others focused.

Brad, how about you?

Brad: Well, being a visionary, I'm going to take a little different angle on this. Our investment in our employees is really for everyone to identify the gifts that God has given them and to develop them to their fullest potential. And we feel like when people feel like they're in control over at least over part of their future and they have support from others along the way, then they can do some amazing things. Thus, this pays off in the marketplace, not only with the highest-quality products and systems, but also pays off by having never-ending improvements and to create greater value for our customers and increasing our sales and profits.

And I'm going to give you two examples. We had one person who started out in our fan assembly. Then, they moved up to graphic design for our manuals. Then, they moved into our engineering fan-system layouts. And now this person is our full-time videographer, producing some of the highest-quality videos on our website ever. In fact, we just won some kind of a video award here recently.

Another example is a person who started out as an office manager. Then, they saw that we had a need for a human-resource manager, wanted to do that, so we trained him and allowed him to move into the H.R. manager position. Then, we had a need for marketing manager, and he wanted to try that. And today they’re our full-time marketing manager.

So I think—and I could go on to a lot of other examples of how employees have grown into their natural God-given gifts that provides the most for our customers, too.

Al: You know, just reflecting on what you said here. I mean, from the first example, somebody on the manufacturing floor doing fan assembly, and then, all of a sudden, you see they have the ability to do graphic work, and you move him to doing graphic design. And then, they're helping to engineer your fan-system layouts, and now they switched again to doing video. And boy, to recognize those gifts in to somebody, you know, much like an office manager to H.R. leader to a marketing manager, giving him those opportunities. Those are great examples.

You know, your strong workplace culture gives you a competitive advantage. I believe that the key competitive advantages for many organizations is the workplace culture. I would think that customers like working with employees who are excited about their products and their work. So tell us a story about a customer who was won over by your positive workplace culture. Perhaps it was a customer who had a complicated situation, where your team was fully invested in figuring out a solution, or maybe you could just share a customer win with us.

Jordan: Well, I've got several of these stories, but just this week I had a customer tell me how grateful they were for our responsiveness. They had actually improperly installed one of our fans, which turned, unfortunately, into a significant safety risk for them. And this was a problem that really wasn't our fault, per se. But our regional salesman dropped everything he was doing, and he drove six hours to be on site the next day. And it gave the customer the support and clarity for the situation that they needed in order to come to a remedy and a solution so that they could be assured that this didn't happen again. We helped them make sure that improper installation doesn't happen, and they get it right the first time. So it takes having employees that really care about the customer and know that they're going to be backed by the leadership team if they need to make a judgment call on doing the right thing for the customer. So it’s never in question. And when you take care of employees, they’re a lot more likely to take care of the customers.

Al: I love that connection. You take care of your employees, they'll take care of your customers, even if it means driving six hours the next morning. Yeah, absolutely.

Brad?

Brad: Well, I'll give more of a maybe a historical example. When we moved from doing a commercial to industrial projects, we had a lot of challenges to overcome. And with one particular customer, they wanted many changes. And what they always told us was that they have many suppliers, but we are the supplier that is always proactive rather than just reactive. In fact, they said, “You overreact almost to the problems in order to get it solved. And that's what we like about your culture.”

Al: There's a competitive advantage right there. They notice the difference between you and other organizations, and your culture helps to create that kind of proactive approach. Yeah.

Well, your employee engagement has increased over the even the past few years. I mean, you've made initially a huge jump, and now it's continued to improve. So do you see an impact? And this is the—okay, for our listeners, this is the question I always get. So is it worth it, really, having a flourishing workplace culture? So I'm going to ask you guys, do you see an impact on your financial health as your workplace culture has improved? Are there some new opportunities that you now have because of the level of employee engagement? Brad, your thoughts.

Brad: Well, Al, last year our sales and profits grew by, I think a little over 80%. We almost doubled. You know, we've added new sales representatives, you know, that meet our core values. Our team has stepped up on our digital marketing is a big part of that. We've added unbelievable content videos on our website so that our customers today can answer a lot of their questions before they ever get one of our personnel involved with them. Our team has trained and supported independent reps in Europe, Asia, North Africa. And we've developed some new products. We have a hazardous-duty-certified fans, only one in the world that does that. And I could go on and on about the results of becoming a flourishing company with everybody rowing in the same direction.

Al: Yeah. Everybody rowing in the same direction. Yeah, absolutely.

Jordan?

Jordan: Yeah. Brad’s talking about the growth in profits. You know, we've got to be profitable in order to keep the doors open. And now that we're all working in sync, it makes it a lot easier to reinvest some of those profits back into our team, back into the community as well. And we do some pretty significant quarterly outings with our employees as well as some neat, caring activities through our caring team. And this caring team is something that we've been doing for a couple of years now, but I feel like we're just at the beginning of what this team is capable of doing. And, you know, this is the result of having the right people on the team, and now we've got the funds to do it because of those profits that Brad was talking about. And so now we can just multiply our efforts not only in the workplace but in the lives of our families and customers and community as well.

Al: Jordan, you mentioned a caring team. Can you just give us a little bit of an example of what that caring team does?

Jordan: Sure. Well, they are in charge of our quarterly outings, so in the spring we do something fun for the employees. We take a day off work and go do something fun. The last couple of years we've gone high-speed go-kart racing, and that's a lot of fun, something that absolutely everybody enjoys. And then, midyear we kind of do a family event. So that’s a local baseball game or a picnic at a park, with some events for kids and things like that, and a food truck. And then, in the fall we generally do an outreach day. So we do Habitat for Humanity or go to a local mission and work there. And then, at Christmas we do a big Christmas party. So they're heavily involved in those events, but they are also caring for our employees. So if an employee has a need, they reach out to our care team, and we can generally offer some funds in some form or fashion to help them get out of a sticky situation. Or, you know, maybe they're going on a mission trip, need some support for that. Our care team’s there and available to help support those kind of initiatives. We support a child in Indonesia monthly, and the care team's in charge of that, making sure that that happens and we're engaged in those kind of activities.

Al: Yeah. Wow.

Well, Brad and Jordan, this has just been a great conversation, and I thank you so much for it. As I look back at it, just again, the way you've really focused on values, how you focused on getting the right people in the right seats, especially in the starting with a leadership team, humble, hungry, smart, grateful, how you focus on that, how you interview based on it, how character is so important in hiring, how you've included those four values and regular reviews, and you talk about them on a regular basis. That's great advice for any organization. And how you have your overall goals, and then, you break them down into quarterly goals, and you, then, review those on quarterly meetings with all employees, with the leadership team. You meet every week to talk about the progress on those, to make sure that you're making progress, and how your employees really buy into what you're doing, and especially how they understand how they're working to make safer, healthier work environments for others and how that gives them such an important meaning and purpose. And how you having a flourishing culture just really impacts the customer service that you're able to provide and the desire to make sure it's fantastic. But then, as you've summarized at the end, how that has impacted your growth and profitability dramatically and how that allows you to, then, to reinvest in your people with these fun outings. And I want to come to the next high-speed go-kart-racing day that you've got, no question about it.

So, is there anything that you'd like to add that we've talked about, just to kind of put a bow on it?

Brad: Well, Al, I want to tell any CEO or owner that the culture is your responsibility. You can't just pawn it off on your H.R. department. It really begins with the humility to see clearly, and then, the hunger to carry you through the painful changes required.

Al: And you're speaking from experience there, Brad, I know, for sure. Yeah.

Jordan: Yeah. If you don't like it, change it. You don't have to live with a toxic workplace culture. It can be better. It really doesn't have to stay the same forever. But it does take some initiative to make things better. But it's worth every ounce of work that it takes to have a flourishing culture. It’s the most rewarding work that you can do for yourself and for your employees as well.

Al: Amen and amen.

Well, Brad and Jordan, thank you so much for your contributions today. And most of all, I appreciate your commitment to serving God's kingdom through excellence in your business practices and providing a flourishing workplace culture for your employees. Thank you for taking time out today and speaking into the lives of so many leaders who are listening.

Brad: Thanks, Al, for allowing us to share with your audience our experiences. And I hope it will encourage many to commit to the journey of becoming a better company.

Al: Thank you so much for listening to my conversation with Brad Carr and Jordan Newton. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

You can find ways to connect with them and links to everything we discussed in the show notes and transcript at workplaces.org/podcast.

And if you have any suggestions for me about our podcast and have any questions on flourishing workplace cultures, please email me, al@workplaces.org.

And thank you for tuning into today's episode of the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast. And if you found value in our discussion, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review. Visit workplaces.org to explore more resources and tools to help you create a flourishing workplace culture.

Outro: The Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast is sponsored by Best Christian Workplaces. If you need support building a flourishing workplace culture, please visit workplaces.org for more information.

We'll see you again next week for more valuable content to help you develop strong leaders and build a flourishing workplace culture.

Al: And you won't want to miss next week’s episode entitled “How a Healthy Board in Africa Built a Healthy Workplace Culture,” with our guest, Victoria Mupwaya of the Miracle Life Church in Zambia.