Keith Middleton: Thanks for everybody for coming in today, kicking off our leadership team meeting. Ground rules, everybody has a say, no stupid questions. We kind of kick off to—are you here? Is your head here? If it is, great. If not, share.
Unnamed speaker 1: Totally here.
Unnamed speaker 2: I'm all here.
Unnamed speaker 3: I'm all in.
Jeremy Spidell: All in, as well. I've got a few things going on at home that are, like, knocking on the door a bit, but I'm dialed into this, and I'll make space for that later.
Keith: Obviously, anything we can do, let us know.
Jeremy: OK.
Unnamed speaker 4: I'm about 80% here, and also 10% at my pickleball game today.
Keith: Fahrenheit was founded by Rich Reinecke and myself in 2010. It was just the two of us, making all the decisions, running the business, a very flat organization. Didn't focus on leadership development, didn't focus on employee development overall. We just hired senior-level people, focused on growth, and eventually potentially a sale.
And then, one day, kind of heading into our 10-year anniversary, we sat back and said, what do we want to be? Do we want to be a lifestyle business? Do we want to push the pedal down? We said, push the pedal down. And with that, we knew that the two of us could scale the business, but we couldn't scale it to where we wanted to go.
And so with that, we said, we need a leadership team. And pulled together members, really practiced leaders, key people in the firm. And said, all right, let's put together a leadership team and start focusing on leadership development.
We really did a deep dive into the gaps—where were we, where would we want to go? Both from how we were running the company, as individuals, a team. And then, really strategy.
So we walked out of there with really three key takeaways that has transformed the company. One is a formal strategy—Rich and I were just kind of running the company and going where our clients took us. And so having a formal strategy that we could have the leadership team, but then all of our employees get behind—understand, clarity, where are we going, how are we going to get there—was a game changer.
The second thing was walking out of there with more work to do on the leadership team itself. And what that gave us was some common language. You know, it gave us some standard agendas that we still use today. And really, how do we continually improve that team?
And then, lastly, the relationships we have amongst the leadership team are deep.
Unnamed speaker 5: The rest of it—
Keith: We went through an assessment around motives, both as a team, but then a deeper dive as it relates to myself and how that plays out in my leadership. And an example of that is, you're kind of performance-driven, people-driven, or kind of facts and processes, and I'm kind of in the middle. And so from a leadership team perspective, it gave us this common language to figure out, OK, what's their motive? Where are they coming from? This person is really about performance and this person is really about people—how do you bridge that from a leadership perspective?
And probably the last thing, I walked out of there with a leadership purpose. And for me, it was to truly seek to understand and empower people. I thought I listened, but I didn't really understand. And I thought I empowered people, but I found out I empowered them if they did it the way I wanted to. And so, it was really walking out of there really powerful from helping me be a leader and run the company.
Jeremy: Yeah, so—Keith—I mean, this is something that clearly you've done well at Fahrenheit. You've got 140 employees now. So what are you seeing as a leader that has helped Fahrenheit's retention, or even some of the clients that you work with?
Keith: Yeah, so Rich and I spent from day one, it was about brand and culture. And so this transition through the leadership team, and really diving into more culture, employee engagement, and really coming up, what's the purpose? Early on, we didn't focus on why we, didn't focus on strategy, we just focused on growth.
And so we have really seen a huge difference in recruiting and retention—of getting the team on board of why we're there. And it leads to a lot of—from our perspective—another one, it's community. We're seeing workers—pay is important, but how are you engaged in the community has really bubbled up more so than ever.
Leadership development, employee development, creating a career path is a must-have now. Through this labor market, we've been able to successfully hire and retain, but that has come back with feedback of what's my career path? Where am I heading? What's the development?
And then, pulling it all together is kind of that strategy—like having a purpose, but then having a strategy, where is the business going, and connecting it to the purpose of why you're there—those are kind of the key areas. And probably the last place that we've worked with since day one. But it helped us in the tight labor market, as we call work-life integration.
And so good or bad, not balanced, because we all know that life comes to work, and sometimes work goes in life. And so we give our employees the flexibility to deal with life, to engage life. And I think that actually has been huge the last couple of years.
Thanks to everybody for coming, appreciate it. Have a good rest of your day.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Can't help you there. Oh—
We talked about—
Thank you.
See you.
See you.
Thank you. Good job.
Good job.
Thank you. Thank you.