88: Promote Employee Supremacy with Andy Alsop

20
Mar

Andy Alsop is the inventor of the Employee Supremacy Operational Model and the CEO of The Receptionist, a leading iPad-based visitor management solution installed in more than 5500 locations worldwide. We talk about the effectiveness of visitor management solutions, employee supremacy at the workplace, and how company cultures influence employee loyalty. 

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Promote Employee Supremacy with Andy Alsop

Our guest is Andy Alsop, the inventor of the Employee Supremacy Operational Model and the CEO of The Receptionist, the leading iPad visitor management solution installed in more than 5,500 locations around the world. Andy, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Steve.

It’s great to have you on the show. So as always, I’d like to start with your entrepreneurial journey. So give us an overview of, a short overview of how you arrived at owning the Receptionist and your growing the company.

Well, I’ve always been an entrepreneur for my entire career. It’s pretty much like I feel like I was born to be an entrepreneur. Many people don’t know what they wanted to do, but I knew very early on in my life that’s what I wanted to do. And it probably was influenced by the fact that I come from an entrepreneurial family. I have been the founder or co-founder in about three tech startups in New Mexico and involved at a high level and a few others over the course of about 20 years.

And then in 2014, after not really feeling satisfied with the success I’d had in New Mexico, I decided I was going to move my entrepreneurial career to Denver. And so I decided, why not pick up my roots, my entrepreneurial roots and bring them to Denver. And I really, what I ended up doing in July of 2014 was really just saying, I’m gonna get to know as many people as I can. I leveraged my networks, people who I knew in New Mexico, the new people in Denver, really getting to know people, not just Denver, Boulder, even some meetings down in Colorado Springs.

And then as a result of that, I kind of networked my way into this opportunity where I met a guy by the name of Ted Guggenheim, who owned Texas. And Texas is a small startup that had two different startups running under one roof with no money. And one of them was what was then called the iPad receptionist. So he and I collaborated and I said, you know, what if I just bought this from you? And he said, that’d be great. Gave them a little infusion of cash. And then also gave me the opportunity to take over a business that already had product market fit. And that was huge because, you know, starting something from scratch is really hard.

And these guys have done an amazing job where they had brought on about 120 locations, not many, to use this software. It was kind of a distraction to what they were doing with their business text us. So it’s kind of like this good fit where I ended up taking over the iPad receptionist, now known as the receptionist, and been able to, luckily enough, take that from 120 locations to getting close to 5,000 locations, actually. And it’s just one of those stories. We started a folding table in this coworking space called Industry that is in the North side of Denver. And it’s just me in it and one of the sales guys. And that’s kind of where it all started and how I ended up getting to run the receptionist.

That’s an amazing story. So going from 120 location to 4,500 location, that’s a big growth to manage. So before we dive into the growth, I’m really curious. I mean, is this a competitive market? Do you have other people trying to do the same thing or are you pretty much on the market?

Yes, we do. In fact, there’s a lot of consolidation going on in our business right now. We are the only ones who have not taken on venture capital. Pretty much every one of the competitors or what I like to call rivals have taken on anywhere from probably 15 million to $150 million in venture capital. And now what’s happening is they’re being bought by private equity companies, they’re merging with other companies, they’re taking on more capital to execute a huge land grab strategy.

So yeah, it’s been pretty impressive. Some of these companies starting out, you know, after we started, and I feel like we’ve had a lot of success based on the fact that we’ve kept it bootstrapped and we haven’t gone, you know, wild with a whole bunch of capital. And it gets down to this philosophy you introduced, which is employee supremacy as well.

I definitely want to ask about that, but just curious that, do you feel like you can compete with these people who have all that capital available to them to grow?

Well, it’s been interesting in the strategies that they’ve taken. There’s one, probably I don’t mind mentioning our competitors. One is called Envoy. And their philosophy is they’re going to create all the electronic components you need for your office. So visitor management is one, but you need room booking. With the pandemic and what’s happened with how we’re now officing, they’ve created hot desking. They have a delivery solution. I really admire what their strategy is. And they need to be able to kind of go after everybody with all of these solutions.

And that takes an enormous amount of capital to be able to do so. The other one is somebody I admire a lot is the attraction guests. They go very heavily into, we have all the tools that you can use within your enterprise, and then they got bought, and then they’re going into a roll up where there’s gonna be a lot of different solutions put together. Those philosophies or those strategies do require a ton of capital to be able to get to where they want to be in the marketplace.

But what was really interesting is that one of the entrepreneurs I’ve mentioned in my past who has been very influential in my life is one of my brothers. And he happens to be a venture capitalist. And when I bought this business, he said, you know, Andy, I’m not sure you really actually need venture capital to be able to grow this because SaaS businesses throw off a lot of cash. And so far we’ve been able to compete. We do, you know, I hate to say the word steal, but we do end up getting a lot of business from previous Envoy customers and other customers out there. And I know that they take some of our customers as well.

But I’ve heard some of the metrics out there, and with all that venture capital, I don’t believe they have acquired that many more customers than we have. We are launching a new strategy, which we’re super excited about, we’ve been very deliberate about, and that strategy, I believe, fits the bootstrap model that we have. And we’re gonna be able to create a ton of value as a result of that strategy. I’m looking forward to being able to announce that pretty soon.

Okay, that’s very interesting. I mean, it’s a great opportunity if you can grow bootstrap and you’re not beholden to a venture fund and the timelines of a venture fund and all the pressures of the next round of funding, which can be a major distraction for a company. So that’s pretty awesome. So that takes us to the topic of the management blueprint of your company, which you called the employee supremacy operating model. So Andy, tell us a little bit about what this is about and how it works and why it’s so powerful.

Well, and I wanted to ask, because I know that you said that what has been most influential, there’s been two. So, can I share two?

Sure.

Right. Okay, good. I mean, there’s lots of I, I listened to a lot of business books, I consume a lot of information, because there’s so much you can always get out of that in terms of how you want to operate your business. But the two that are seminal to what what’s happened with us, is one I know that you’re very familiar with, which is traction, get a grip on your business by Gina Wickman. And what that gave us was really one of the most important things for me, which was core values. I did not realize how critical core values are to your organization.

Discovering the significance of core values was pivotal for organization's growth. Click To Tweet

And the book really showed me that. And I was able to, we really dug into that one. And it has changed because now we know things like who are the right people to get on the bus with you? Who are you looking for? And the people on the bus that you get on with will impact what you do in your business. So it also really kind of taught us the organizational side of the business. How do you organize? How do you have level 10 meetings?

You know, all the different philosophies and it helped us kind of like take the chaos that was our startup before and kind of bring it down to something that’s a little more calm and peaceful and we were able to kind of run for it with it. The next one was, it has been the Infinite Game by Simon Sinek and this has only been maybe in the last, I would say, 18 months that’s made a change to that for us. And one of them is, he has all sorts of philosophies in the book. And there are five of them that are really important to kind of what I would consider the people component.

But the one that he brought up, I was reading his book and it said things like trusting teams. Yeah, yeah, we got that. Worthy rivals and understanding who your rivals are and existential flexibility. I was like, yeah, yeah, we’re flexible and we do those things. Courage to lead, we have the courage to lead. But he said, you need to have a just cause. And I remember reading that and saying, what is our just cause? I mean, yeah, I wanna build a great business management company. Nah, that didn’t feel like much. So that really were, those are the two kind of, I would say the blueprints and the business framework that we’ve begun to operate on. And without them, I just don’t think that we would be where we are.

A just cause is the compass guiding a company's journey, illuminating the path towards purpose beyond profit. Click To Tweet

I love that way of expressing just cause. It sounds similar to the purpose or the why of the organization, the higher purpose of it. But the just cause really describes that it has to be something that is bigger than just making money or just promoting a product. It has to be something that you’re ready to fight for, you know, just cause as an organization.

It’s so true. And I think that that is where kind of the switch flipped for us is when we actually got into our just cause and discovered it. And I tell the story a lot. Part of the discovering your just cause is you have to understand what is your why. And if anybody has ever heard of Simon Sinek, that’s almost one of the first like philosophies that, yeah, yeah, start with why. And, you know, he has this one where he’s writing on a whiteboard and I can’t remember how many years ago and he’s describing Apple’s why.

And he does this great job, but we had to start with what our why was. And it was the fact that we collaboratively between the leadership team all went away and said, what are our own personal whys? Because that’s what we’re bringing to the business while we’re doing this. And there was this sort of magic that came together when we read all of our whys and said, well, we can make this into our company why. And then from our company why, it drove us right into the just cause. And it was just, for me, I think it was so important. And for the whole leadership team, because it meant we were really all on the same page and then ended up discovering what our Just Cause was.

So, was your company vibe different, the original company vibe that you came up with, different from the eventual Just Cause?

The vibe?

Is that what you’re saying? Yes, so you said that based on your individual vibes, you came up with a company vibe and then you refined it into the just cause. So this original company, why was it different? And what was the difference if there was?

I think the difference was we didn’t have a why. We didn’t really know why we were doing it other than let’s just kind of build a great business, you know, and it didn’t really kind of, honestly, and it’s a very good question you ask because my co-founder, Dylan Barry, who’s our director of engineering, would challenge me a lot. I would say things, because, you know, very early on, I thought, honestly, in the very beginning, I thought we did need to get venture capital and we did need to grow and we needed to go bigger, go home and do all of these things that are so traditional in growing a business.

And I’d say, well, we have to grow. And he’d look at me and say, why? I’d say, so we can make a lot of money or, you know, and it never felt like there was anything behind it that I could really deliver. And I’m so glad he challenged me on that. So if there was a why in the past, it’s probably what it was until we actually went through this exercise and realized that there was very close alignment across the entire leadership team, that people and employees and doing right by others was really something that is a cause we could really get behind. And that makes us more motivated every single day to do what we do.

Okay, so let me ask you then the question, why is it important to have employee supremacy? And what does it even mean, employee supremacy?

Well, okay, so I’m going to start off because I’ve talked a lot about our Just Cause. I think it’s a good lead-in to it, but this is what we came up with in those leadership meetings I was talking about. It is to build a world where a company’s profit fuel the mission to be in service to its employees and the community. And so from that, we had that for a while, and then what happened was I boiled it down after listening to this Inc.com interview that Simon Sinek does.

And I listened to it a bunch of times and he talked about shareholder supremacy and basically having to be beholden to the shareholders in everything you do and sort of the damage it has. So from that, I came out with employee supremacy. And so what is it? It’s really a contrast between two different styles of leadership and management philosophy. So shareholder supremacy means that when your decision-making is based on what’s best for your shareholders, you take actions that are in the best interest of the shareholders, right?

So everything you’re doing is to make sure that the shareholders, and you know, shareholder sounds like, oh, those must be the rich people who own Amazon stock and stuff. All of our businesses, we are shareholders. I am a shareholder in this business. And, of course, we’re a C corporation. But even if you’re an LLC or whatever, you’re still a shareholder in a business. And so it’s very easy to say that’s what we need to be focused on. Now, employee supremacy means that when your decision making is based on what’s best for your employees.

You take actions that are in the best interest of the employees, and then that in turn benefits your customers, the community that surrounds your company that’s really important, and ultimately, ultimately your shareholders. So it’s not some sort of philosophy that says the shareholders are bad or anything else. Again, I’m the largest shareholder in my business. It means that it is a different way of getting to grow shareholder value, and that’s by focusing on the employees, because then you’re going to impact the customers and the community.

And when I said that community is really important to you around you, that’s all of your contractors. That might even be the organizations in the cities where you’re based, where you want to make sure you’re impacting them, so they can support you and your company and you support them and what they’re doing as well. And all of that means that what you’re doing in the end is growing shareholder value.

Employee supremacy isn't about disregarding shareholders but fostering a culture where valuing employees ultimately enriches shareholder value. Click To Tweet

So how do you actually do that? So you are making your employees supreme, contractors supreme. What does it actually look like in day to day decisions that you are prioritizing employees? And I understand it’s not shareholders. I’m not looking at the negation of the shareholder value. I get that. But what is the intentionality about putting the employee first and focusing on the employee? What kind of stuff are you guys doing and how does it influence your decision-making?

It’s interesting because I’ve talked to other different entrepreneurs. And when I deliver this philosophy, because I’m trying to get it out there as much as possible. If you remember the just cause to build a world. So what we actually want to do is show that this is the way you can run a company and be able to grow shareholder value. And then other people will then be able to do the same thing. But I like to do it through example.

One of the things is, uh, some actually, I’ll just tell you that that my brother another brother of mine that’s all this entrepreneurial blood in our family he grew a company called progress software and he basically said what we didn’t want to do is to have um benefits that were a little bit too good because then we might be able to we might end up getting um sure you know employees who want to come to our company because we have really good benefits, because we have the opportunity to have the discussion with the employees, the potential employees who want to be with our company, and then we get to choose the best of the breed so you can bring in just the best.

So another example is, let’s say, for instance, about, I can’t remember how long ago it was, but we had to go through, I think it’s called our benefits enrollment period for our benefits. And that’s where you come every year to the insurance company and they say, okay, what do you want your benefits to be like this year? And it’s like that. And I said, I want to invest in our employees. So we had said previously, we would do 90%. We would pay 90% of the employees premiums.

And I said, why don’t we just go ahead and make it 100%? And then for families, instead of making it 50%, let’s make it 60%. Now, if you have to make that decision in a shareholder supremacy company, where your shareholders, your investors, all the board of directors are saying, you need to deliver as much profit as possible to the shareholders. Well, then what you need to do is actually reduce those benefits just down to as little as you possibly can without losing employees.

Well, what I’m saying is an employee supremacy, what you want to do is actually invest in the employees, make them feel secure, make them feel trusted, make them feel like the company has their back. And then by doing so, what you’re actually doing is improving their lives. And then what happens? They go and they’re the ones who are in front of the customers all day. I’m not doing the billing. There are, my team is on chat right now. My team is out there selling to the customers. My team is doing the things that face the customer.

Investing in employees isn't just about empowering a workforce; it's about arming the frontline warriors who face customers daily, shaping lives, securing trust, and embodying the very essence of the company's values. Click To Tweet

I’m not the one doing it. Neither are the investors. And normally the largest shareholders are not doing it either. So why are we focusing on them? Why don’t we focus on the employees because the employees are the ones making the impact for the company. I have tons of examples and I could go on, but I won’t take up the whole podcast.

Got it, so basically by taking care of your employees, they’re gonna be raving fans of your company and that they’re gonna project this out and they’re going to treat the customers the same way as they are being treated in-house, internally, and that’s just going to project this out. And they’re going to treat the customers that same way as they are being treated in house internally, and that’s just going to create this ripple effect in the community and in the market., so I have another question around this, and then I’d like to move on because there’s so much interesting stuff to talk about your business as well, so what’s kind of begging an answer for me is, other than benefits, what other stuff are you doing for your employees?

Let’s see. So we involve them in – and it’s too hard to say like we involve them in every decision. But let’s even say – I’ll take another example that’s not necessarily benefit-related. But for instance, here’s one. Here’s a good example. One of our employees, we found an error in their spreadsheet, their commission spreadsheet. It was a calculation error that was just kind of a, you know, something, but it compounded itself over time. When you’re running under employee supremacy, what ended up happening is our director of sales and myself, he said, I just found a mistake. And it was really not a question about what you end up doing in that situation.

Now, under shareholder supremacy, and I’ve run companies under shareholder supremacy, it’s like, well, we really, do we disclose that? You know, the employee will never know that it actually was there. So it philosophically changes how you go about making decisions and creating what are called trusting teams. And so when we took that to the employee, you could see in their face this sort of, wow, they didn’t have to even tell me that. I didn’t know that that was happening. But the impact that that had on the trusting teams that were building in the company was just exponential. So I guess that would be another example of how it is outside of benefits.

Okay, well, that’s definitely cool. And so the trusting team, is this a special concept or is just the fact that you are building this trust with your teams in the organization? Is there a special twist to it?

Well, I mean, the trusting teams are definitely this philosophy that came from Simon Sinek and from the Infinite Game. And if you’re running an infinite company, one that’s not just trying to get, you know, the best out of this quarter, but it’s actually running to be there and perpetuating what he calls the infinite game, as opposed to the finite game, you need to have trusting teams. So it’s a component that I know Simon Sinek is out there talking about. And it’s a component that I believe has to be a part of employee supremacy, or else you lose, you know, everything that you’re trying to achieve as a result of employee supremacy.

Okay. Got it. So it’s all about creating that longevity, that perpetuity, this perpetual culture that doesn’t depend on the founder. It’s going to move the company forward. That’s exciting. So switching gears here, I’d like to ask a couple of questions about the receptionist as well. So you call the receptionist a visitor management software solution. So what is this? What’s a visitor management software and what is it designed to do?

Well it is essentially designed visitor management actually in and of itself has been around for a long time in different incarnations. But of course, with the evolution of things like tablets and stuff, the iPad came out and it’s a natural sort of interface for visitors to an office. And so if you think about it, when you walk into an office, usually what happens is you go to the receptionist, you pick up a phone, or you do something and say, hey, I’m here, and then somebody will come and get you.

Visitor management is basically taking that sort of simple operation of walking into an office, but now what you’re doing is checking in on an iPad, you’re finding the contact you’re there to see, you check in with them, the iPad sends the text message to the person you’re there to see, and then the iPad can do all sorts of things as well. It can process, you know, questionnaires, NDAs, it can take pictures of the guests, it can print out a badge, it can do all of these things that may normally have been done by somebody at a front desk, but now that mundane task is taken away. And the thing that people love, one of the things they love and gets them, that gets us through into the door is the visitor logbook.

You know, how many times have you gone in and you scratched your name in a visitor logbook? And what are they going to do with that information? I can’t read who’s here, who you’re here to see. And so now it replaces the visitor logbook. And for the company, that can be really critical because they need to know when people are coming and when people are going from their facility. So it kind of manages all that. And it does it in kind of a very smooth way where nobody else has to be involved and the employee who is being seen by somebody can get a quick notification, see a picture of the guest and that type of thing before they actually come down to visit them.

That’s cool, actually, I think I used one of these solutions. Maybe it was even the receptionist is an iPad based visitor management. And I’ve had to see this, this was a prospect, a client prospect that I went to see, it was a defense company. And I went in there and it’s asked me, there was nobody in the reception area. It was really early, 7 a.m. in the morning, and I started punching stuff in, my name. And then it asked the question, are you a U.S. citizen? And I said, wow, this is a defense company.

So they want to know that. And just the day before I got my citizenship, so I could say yes to this. And they let me in. If it was one day earlier, I should have gone in to visit with this friend. It became a client. So it was a really cool, I think, experience. So other than letting people in, I mean, what are the growth areas? Are there other functionalities that a software like that could could perform and how do you grow it, grow the business rather than just having more units everywhere?

I mean, the way you grow it is there are, it’s interesting because I’ve shown you, kind of told you how the competitors have done it, you know, one is saying, okay, we’re just going to make visitor management one of the many pieces that we’re going to have, and then another one is, you know, we’re going to be growing into the enterprise and things like that. One of the things that happens is that the data you end up collecting inside a visitor management system actually is very important data and leads to other processes that exist within the organization.

And it’s funny, because you can usually get it into an organization and they really just want to manage their visitors and just be able to notify the contacts and stuff like that. But then all of a sudden I start asking for, what about this and what about that? So there are different features and functionality that you can bring to the organization and continually expand as the needs of the organization grow for visitor management. So that’s definitely one of the ways we are growing in addition to just expanding.

Can you give a couple of examples? So what other functionalities could there be?

Well, let’s say for instance, there are different types of, one that’s come up a lot is COVID. There is so much COVID screening. So I’ll just give you a simple example. The companies will come to us and they say, well, we need to know if somebody is answering one of the five questions, which you’ve seen before, do you have a fever? Have you been sick in the last 14 days? That kind of stuff. And somebody says, they’re supposed to say no to all of them, but maybe they say yes to one of them. Just that simple.

They want to make sure that the person who is in charge of who gets in the door and stuff gets a notification. So that’s just like a simple thing that happens there. Other ones are things like integrations with Salesforce. A lot of people want to be able to take the people who walk into their office and be able to put them on their sales list, especially if they come in in their prospect or something like that. And they want that visit information. There’s some legal stuff that goes on. Sometimes they want to be able to make sure that maybe that person has been vetted before they come through the door.

So there’s this concept that we have a pre-registration and there is the need in many cases where kind of the legal organization wants to say, you know, we’ve got a lot of sensitive data and a lot of sensitive information. We’re not just going to let anybody who walks through the door come through. We need to have a whole process about whether that person actually is allowed in. So those are some of the examples, and they go on and on. There’s a lot of examples.

It’s really interesting, you know, how this, the receptionist function has evolved over the years. When I was running my business 20 years ago, I had a receptionist, that person was also an administrative person. In my parents’ generation, there were typists, there were multiple typists. You know, for some leaders, they needed multiple of them because they wore them out, like Winston Churchill always had two or three at hand. So this basically is an evolution.

Do you see this as kind of part of the automation of manual jobs, which allow deliberate people so that they can do more creative and more thinking, more empowered jobs in companies? Or do you see this as similar to when I walk into a fast food you know, fast burger joint, then they seem to have the portals and grocery stores have the checkout portals now becoming airports, becoming a commonplace. So anything that’s very menial and just data input that is becoming automated and the people are actually advising you and helping you with stuff that requires judgment and thinking.

I would say, and it’s kind of a hot button topic sometimes when people say, but you’re taking away jobs of receptionists. And if you just look back in time, I mean, even the people who used to drive the horse drawn carriages or whatever, being taken over by cars. And, you know, even looking back at voicemail, just like you said, in companies, there were people who took messages and then handed pieces of paper to other people and then voicemail took over.

And then when the ATM machine came along, everybody’s thinking, what’s going to happen to all the cashiers and stuff, because now we can just go get our own money. So it happens. It is part of what happens. We try not to say that we’re wiping out receptionists, but it is, you know, we do have companies and and we need to help them do what they need to do to be viable as businesses. And so many companies can’t afford a receptionist other than they may want a receptionist, but in the end they can’t because they can’t, you know, afford to have, not to have the front desk, you know, unmanned or have nobody there, but they also need somebody.

So in many cases, that’s where we’re brought in is very, you know, sort of chaotic areas. There’s a lot of times where you’d walk into a vestibule, maybe in a manufacturing company that never had anybody, and there’s a phone there, and the cord on the phone is broken, and there’s a list of numbers you’re supposed to call next to it, right? And so, yeah, when we go into those, that’s where all of a sudden they say, wow, this problem has been completely solved. And then there’s the other where what companies find they can do is they can take that person who was doing the reception function, which was rather mundane and everything. They don’t have to be tied to the front desk.

They now have somebody who can greet the guest and say, could you please check in on the iPad? But while you’re waiting, let me get you a cup of coffee. Let me go grab your coat. If nobody’s there, they can be doing something else that is high value than just sitting at the desk and stuff. So it does come down to a shift, a shift to being able to be more efficient and not really have to do those things. I don’t think we look back on ATMs and say, boy, I wish I always had to go into a bank from nine to five on Monday through Friday to get my cash every week.

That’s definitely true. And about 10 years ago, I was reading a book about this concept of creating a networking group of the top 100 professionals in a city. And then I set out to create a networking group here in Richmond. And I went through the list. It was a list from 10 years before what are the major professions. And actually 60 of the 100, they suggested, didn’t even exist anymore. So it was a crazy revelation how much jobs are changing all the time. And now we have the great resignation, so it’s not a question of, you know, destroying jobs, it’s a question of destroying employees, right? Employees kind of checking out and no longer are in the labor market. They are no longer available for hire, so this relationship completely flipped and the robots are nowhere near taking over.

Exactly, and it’s also, it’s a fascinating shift and of course I don’t think this great resignation wouldn’t have happened without COVID, which is just one of these unintended consequences of what’s happened through this whole thing, this great resignation. And I think it’s actually kind of hopefully liberating where some people had an opportunity to reflect on what they wanted to do and realize that what they were doing, they weren’t satisfied with and they were going to make a change. And so I think all of it’s going to wash out. But hopefully then some of the things that are more mundane, like checking people in, can be taken care of by a visitor management system.

By the way, one thing I heard recently about this great resignation that may be one of the contributing factors is that people are working remotely and they are less attached to the culture. They are less inculcated with the company culture. They feel less connected to the company and therefore, you know, if they get an approach that it becomes, okay, do I have a remote job in this company for $50 an hour? Do I have a remote job in this other company at $65 an hour? It becomes a numbers, a decision rather than, oh, I really love this culture. I feel like we are on a mission here. There is this big auditious goal that you’re pursuing, this just cause, as you call it. Do you think that that is happening as well?

Well, we have a lot of remote employees. We were all based in Denver up until, when was the beginning of 2021. And we had three employees who decided as a result of having been fully remote, they were gonna move away. And the tough part that they had was feeling a connection back to the company. And I think that honestly, running under employee supremacy becomes even more important, because it depends. Do you want employees who are going to come in and work for a few weeks or for a few months and then just go on to the next job?

Or do you want to actually create an environment where people want to come to the company, trust the company and know that’s actually a place they can stay? This is very stressful having to change jobs and everything. And so I would probably say that it’s better to run under employee supremacy when you’re remote, because you’re creating a culture that is not just a culture that people see writing on the wall or whatever, but something where they feel like they belong, even though they’re separate from everybody else.

And I think we’ve seen that in our own company. And we’ve even asked our remote employees, like, what can we do and how are we doing at keeping you feeling engaged and part of the company? And they said, because of the way we run the company, they believe that they feel a strong part of the company and feel a connection. We bring them back at least a minimum every quarter anyhow, so that they can be part of it. Of course, COVID, we just had to cancel our January event because of Omicron, but it looks like we’re going to bring them all back in April. And everybody’s super excited about coming back and being together again.

How dynamic is this process of employee supremacy? I mean, if other companies are waking up to this idea, then they’re going to try to put their employees first as well, and they’re going to do more stuff. an arms race between companies to try to kind of temper the employees and make them feel special even more. And what does it mean? What does it mean to you? I mean, you have to come up with creative ideas of how to, you know, how to make this a bigger thing over time.

I mean, you know, there’s the question of how do you get it out there? And that’s something I’ve spent a lot of time on. One of the ways that I’ve been thinking about in terms of getting it out there is that, while I want to impact the Fortune 500 and things like that, I think that their cultures and how they run are pretty much ingrained. What I wanna do is start at a grassroots effort. I wanna be focusing on the Googles that are getting started today and having them shift their thinking.

I had one company we work with as part of our community who brought me on a podcast, and they ended up just saying to me, we’ve implemented employee supremacy, said their employee net promoter score has already gone up, the employees are more engaged. And so, and this is a cool company, I haven’t forgotten to ask them to, whether I can say who they are, so I’m not going to say who they are at this point, but if they do what they say they want to do and what their just cause is, that can have a really big impact on them.

And so that’s where I want to see it. It’s like a grassroots effort in my opinion. That’s where I’m going with this. Traction definitely helped us. And I know, actually, I know another company that was much larger that had to implement traction. Boy, it was much harder for them to implement traction than it is for like when we implemented it like a 10 person company. But essentially it is in my opinion, a simple shift in perception. It’s really just a shift in perception of who are you making decisions for?

And if you can get to that point and say that I’m making decisions for the employees, instead of making the decisions specifically only for the shareholders. You make that simple kind of shift in perception, and then is, you know, basically then you have to get your leadership team on board. And once they’re on board, then how do you go about it? And I’ve already said traction, I think, was something that really helped us because it gets you focused on what your core values are and getting the right people on the bus.

And then the Simon Sinek’s infinite game. And I really think it’s a fairly simple recipe. You know, there’s a lot of companies out there that say we’re employee first, but in the background, they’re still running under shareholder supremacy. So that means if they have a bad quarter, well, we’re gonna have to hack off a quarter of the company because we had a bad quarter. That’s not the best way to run the company, in my opinion. So I say that employee supremacy is now a model, a shift in perception of how you actually decide what you’re going to do and how you’re going to run the company. So I don’t think it’s that hard.

All right, well, definitely, if you’re listening to this, try it out. It’s definitely, it’s a great recipe. And I think Jeff Bezos kind of built Amazon on this principle as well, that they care of your employees and then they will take care of the customers and the customers will take care of the shareholder eventually. So if you’d like to learn more about customer supremacy and Andy and the receptionist, then where should our listeners go and how can they connect with you and your company?

Sure, so it’s thereceptionist.com is our website. And on thereceptionist.com, we’re actually putting together something which will be slash employee/supremacy. And that’s gonna be a five-part podcast on it. You can go to the about the team page, about page. I don’t hide my contact information. You can find me through email, through LinkedIn, all those other things. But on LinkedIn, I’m just, you know how it’s linkedin.com slash in slash and I’m Andy also. And then Twitter is AC also. So this is the places to get engaged with me. And I love it. People reach out to me and I have rich dialogue about actually implementing this. And so I’m open to discussions with anybody.

Okay, well, if you listen to this and you’d like to increase your employee supremacy or make employees Supreme to begin with, then do check out Andy’s resources and reach out to him. Andy, thanks for coming on the show. Really enjoyed chatting with you. And if you like the show, don’t forget to review us and to stay tuned next week because another exciting entrepreneur is going to come on the show and explain their operating system and their management blueprint. Thank you.

 

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