LaSalle Network has landed on Inc. Magazine’s “Inc. 500/5000” list for 10 consecutive years, and has received over 70 culture-based awards for being a “Best Place to Work.” It all starts with LaSalle Network’s Founder and CEO Tom Gimbel’s view on company culture.
In addition to being a nationally recognized entrepreneur, Gimbel is a company culture expert. Therefore, he was an ideal choice to discuss a critical issue for brands.
“I like to believe that we were on the culture bandwagon before anyone else,” says Gimbel. However, that doesn’t mean his nineteen-year-old company hasn’t had a few bumps on its growth path. “I’d say the number one thing that’s allowed us to be successful, aside from getting rid of our hiring mistakes, is wanting to make changes when things are going well.”
READ FULL TRANSCRIPTTom welcome to the Brand Lab Series, I’m thrilled you could join us today. Before we get started, the first question I have to ask is, as a founder who bootstrapped an amazing company here in Chicago, what was harder, the early start-up years or 10 consecutive years on the Inc. 5000?
That’s actually a very good question. The 10 consecutive years, you don’t realize you’re going for it every year, you’re just trying to grow and make sure you don’t lose your rear end along the way. The start-up is scary until you have the cash flow. And I think at each phase, you have to realize that as a CEO and a founder that your role changes, the company changes, and it’s a different… It’s like saying, “Being in third grade, harder or easier than being in eighth grade?” At the time, being in third grade’s hard. And it’s the same thing. I look at the evolution and life cycle of a business like a child. So today, my company’s 19 years old in August, and I’d say we’re kind of like a sophomore in college, and the same challenges that go with that, and some are harder and some are easier.
So as the father of a third-grader, I can appreciate that analogy.
[laughter]
The thing they never teach you about being a parent is how you have to remember how to teach kids to do things that come so easy to us. But why don’t we take a quick step back, I got so excited to have a fellow Inc. Honoree on the studio, but why don’t you just share a little bit about yourself and LaSalle as well for some of our audience that may not be familiar with you?
So today, I’m 45-years-old, I’m a parent of three. I have a junior in high school, a freshman in high school, and a seventh-grader, two boys and a girl. Live in the suburbs of Chicago. I started LaSalle Network as a traditional staffing and recruiting firm, 19 years ago this August. I’d been in the business for two years, so I had some experience and a little bit of a reputation in just a couple years, but it was pre the internet boom. You don’t always like to sound like the old guy, but sometimes you are when you didn’t have a website when you started. Today to not have a website, people would look at you funny. But that was in 1998, and we were a temporary staffing and a search firm, all white-collar, started out doing accounting and finance with myself and two employees. Today, we have over 200 employees, we have business in 20 different states around the country, physical offices in Illinois and California, and nine different lines of business. So it’s been a nice run.
So I don’t wanna date myself but I can appreciate that because in 1998, I was working for Platinum Technology.
Wow, Flip.
Yes, in the pre-dot-com. When I talk to some of my staff and I talk about the pre-dot-com bubble, they don’t understand what I’m talking about. [chuckle]
Well, the difference is you look better than I do, and you have more hair than I do, so it goes okay.
Well, Brian’s always saying that anyone can start a business, but that the trick is staying in business, right? And LaSalle has grown from a few employees to now a few hundred, so what’s your secret?
I like to believe that we were on the culture bandwagon before everybody else, and my belief was always, “Anybody can create a go-go mentality and you just push people and you go after the big money and you do it.” But mine was, “Let’s get really good people and treat them well.” And so our original mission statement was to attract good people and if we did, everything else was academic. It wasn’t about what we do for our clients or what we do in the marketplace, if we had good people, all of that would happen. And being in the recruiting business, there’s always gonna be somebody else who will pay somebody more, who will always… And in today’s day and age, who will offer another perk, who will have… Let you bring your dog into the office or work from home or wear sweatpants or whatever it is. You can’t compete on that level, you have to compete on the ability to provide a sense of community, a stable environment, and to teach and develop people. And as we figured that out, it became easier and easier and easier.
So along the lines of the growth that you’ve talked a little bit about already, we had a guest on season one, the Chief Operating Officer of LearnVest, Ainslie Simmonds. She was a super early employee, and she talked about a couple of the bumps that they had along the way as they grew from 10 employees to 50 to 60 to 100 to 160 and beyond. She described them as natural growing pains, but as someone who was way ahead of the culture curve, how did you balance, and did you have a couple bumps along the way as you continued to grow?
We had huge problems. In the early 2000… I think it was probably 2000, maybe 2001, to try to retain people, we gave four 10-hour days, workdays, instead of five work days. While you went from having five people working as much as they could and wanted to and the pressure of working to now managing themselves on the clock and limiting their time, our production went to heck. No one quit because it was an easy job, but we weren’t growing. And it became something that people came to me, the good people, and said, “This isn’t working, we gotta work five days a week.” And the bad people left. And you start to realize that managing out of fear of turnover is the biggest weakness a manager can have. If you don’t say things or do say the wrong things in order to make sure somebody doesn’t leave, they’re the wrong person. And it’s really about the authenticity. I’m not a big believer in work life and home life and… It should mesh together. And when you’re watching what you’re saying ’cause you’re afraid someone’s gonna leave, that’s the wrong work relationship to have.
Now, there’s ways to do it, you don’t wanna be rude or crass or what have you, but you gotta have authenticity, and I think that’s how you keep people. And there’s a lot of talk about the millennial workplace, and we have… 80% of our workforce is millennial, and I’m very pro-millennial. And people are like, “Oh, they’re entitled,” I don’t believe that’s the case. They wanna know that their bosses are in the trenches with them. They don’t want… The military analogy would be, “They don’t want the general sitting in DC when they’re over in the Middle East giving up their life,” they want the generals in the trenches with them. And that’s what we do, we find people as leaders who wanna work side by side people.
So employees, and obviously engaged employees, are critical to a brand and the experience it provides to its customers. And all too often, companies talk it but they don’t walk it. So how have you been able to communicate that to your employees?
Well, I love what I do and it doesn’t mean I don’t love other things. But I have kids and I have my career, and I carve out a little bit of a social life, but I’m not a car collector, I’m not boating in the summer, I’m not a three handicap. My goal is to build this company and build relationships for our folks and to teach people along the way. The analogy I like to give for our company is, “I like to think we’re more like a teaching hospital.” We bring in young doctors, so to speak, and we teach them and train them how to do it. And they may not have the experience of more seasoned recruiters, but they’re learning, they don’t think they know everything, they’re challenged to take on new tasks, and they’re moldable and that’s what we built. And so I believe that that genuineness shows through that somebody that cares about you, that you… I believe every relationship, there’s reciprocity. I think, Brian, you’d say… You have a third-grade son or daughter?
Daughter.
Daughter, right? If your daughter never was nice to you, and never hugged you, and never told you she loved you, and was mean and broke things, and was just a terrible… It wanes, you wouldn’t go home…
That’s my six-year-old.
[laughter] But you wouldn’t rush home all the time. It’s no matter how bad a kid is, it’s that hug and that touch that makes everything okay, and that’s every relationship is that we want the… People say, “Aw, there’s no reciprocity of being a parent.” There sure as heck is. And there is in every work relationship, that you want the reciprocity, and that’s what we give is we give a place where if employees give of themselves, we give back and not just monetarily.
Yeah, so kind of building upon that, I know you’ve talked a little bit already about the importance of culture, and anyone that knows LaSalle is well aware of that. I think beyond the fascinating Inc. Magazine and some of the other accolades you have as an entrepreneur as well as a company is the fact that I think you guys have been on almost 75 best places to work. Recently, I just saw it in 2017 Crain’s, Entrepreneur Magazine. But what I think is interesting, though, is that the perception in the staffing industry is that there’s a super high turnover?
Correct.
So could you just dive maybe a little deeper in terms of how you continue to create such an amazing place to work in an industry that’s not known for that?
What we do is we have involuntary turnover, right?
Yeah.
Yeah. We terminate people, they don’t quit. So I always feel that if people quit, then they’re saying your culture isn’t right for them. If you fire them, you’re acknowledging that you made a mistake and we have the wrong person in place. And then we track that and we measure it, we’ll look… LinkedIn makes it fairly easy, and we’ll see how many jobs over the following two years the person has. So if somebody quits or gets fired and they find a place and they have two jobs in the next two years, then it wasn’t our fault. If they have one job, then we have to look at it and say, “What did we do wrong here? How do we need to change? How do we need to grow?” I don’t take culture for granted. I hold our management team accountable to it, we talk about it at our every other week management meetings. It’s something that… It’s easy to have it be a talk the talk without walk the walk. We have to… And it’s not surveys, it’s real life. It’s having conversations, it’s our employees feeling that their managers are accessible. The real key to culture isn’t a CEO saying it, it’s middle-management practicing it. Middle-management is the key force of a good positive culture.
Yeah, that’s really interesting. Back to millennials a little bit, marketers are always talking about millennials and I’m refreshed to hear your positive thoughts on millennials, actually, as one myself. Share how you have embraced and surrounded yourself with millennials.
Well, before I get to that, and I’ll probably forget the question after I go on this diatribe for a second, but people need marketing people, content, people need to write about something, right? So when did Tom Brokaw’s book, “The Greatest Generation” come out? 20, 25 years ago? And it was about the World War II group. And I always say, “If the technology that we have today had been around in 1940, we’d have lost at Normandy.” This is not a generational issue, this is a technology issue. Human beings haven’t changed, what’s the quote? I’m not a huge quote guy, but the quote of, “Kids aren’t born racists, they have to learn it from somebody.” We’re all human beings, we’re born, we’re hopefully, or most of us, are smarter than previous generations, and we grow that way. And technology enables people to do things in different ways that we never could have imagined. But parents are the ones that hold them accountable. It kills me when people who are my age or older complain about millennials, they raised them. “Oh, my kid’s not a bad millennial, but your kid is.” It’s ridiculous.
So let’s take some ownership, and how we’re holding them accountable, how we’re training them, and teaching them a work ethic. And people, “Oh, we shouldn’t have to teach them a work ethic.” Why? If they don’t have it, you need to teach them that. And people don’t realize what goes into anything. Everything looks easier from the outside, most things look easier from the outside. So with millennials, it’s trying to relate to them, and there’s generational learning, it’s not always mentors of older to younger. There’s no reason that you can’t have younger people… Heck, I learn stuff maybe not about my day-to-day job, but societal things from the millennials. They teach me what’s going on. We have a huge female base, we have maybe 60% female in our industry and our employee base. And I have a daughter, I have 23-year-old girls that work in my company, and I have a conversation with them at the end of the day at a happy hour or whatever, and I’m learning about what my daughter who’s 15, it was only eight years ago. I can learn… I’m a better father because of the employee base that we have, and I like to think that I’m a better manager because the employees teach me things about interaction and how to use the social media.
Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have texted a client. Wouldn’t have done it. And if I didn’t let people… I didn’t even like to text. I didn’t know how to do it on a phone that didn’t have a keyboard, but that’s my own… [laughter] My own learning disability. But you get to a point today where it’s so commonplace of people do that, and you have to be open to change or you’re gonna be a dinosaur. And they go extinct, they went extinct.
So Natalie, that final tangent reminds me of when we had Dr. Michael Brophy, the President of Benedictine on. So on his first day as president of that university, he introduced himself to all the freshmen students, held out his phone and said, “You can text me any time,” and he still uses a flip phone. And we said, “How are you texting all these people on that phone?” And the type of text he gets from his freshman students, pretty interesting stuff. But I think it gets back to something you said earlier, which I think is really interesting, which is that you like to see LaSalle as a teaching hospital. There’s teachable moments on either side of the desk, or whether you’re a CEO, a mid-manager, a junior-level staffer, regardless of if you’re gen-Xers like you and I, or millennials like Natalie.
I remember the first time that I actually saw you was at the Inc. 5000 conference, and you had this fascinating debate with the co-founder of Method, and the whole argument there was… And I told this story a lot, was that every business needs to be… Have a social mission at its core. And if you remember, which I’m sure you do, people voted before and after, and it was striking how different it was because Tom’s point was that you can have a purpose, but you need to have that profit first. And it was amazing how I think at the beginning it was like 80/20 that every company should have a social mission, which is something you hear so much especially with millennials. So it was really great to see that, which kinda gets back to one other question that I have specifically for you from a leadership vision standpoint. You said your company’s like a sophomore in college, it’s 19-years-old. So obviously, LaSalle was built on your vision but over the course of 19 years, things change. So how do you pivot but still stay true to your vision?
Well, the vision’s changed eight million times. Maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but the vision initially was I believe that we can attract good people, and we can find companies to work with us to find staffing and recruiting solutions. But that was the vision, or the mission, those things get interchanged sometimes. But the reality was, I believed that, but sometimes there’s a title of a book, but the subtitle really tells you what it’s about. So that was the title: Attract good people, do great work for clients, staffing, recruiting. The subtitle was, “Don’t lose your ass.” How do you do that? How hard am I gonna work? How am I gonna figure out a way to get money in the door, to spend less money than I make and make sure that I meet payroll and to grow this business? And as you go along doing it… It was interesting in the first technology wave in ’99, 2000, 2001, which you remember, it was a very different than this surge that we have right… There wasn’t as much private equity money on the… When…
Well, when Flip sold Platinum for $4 billion, it was the biggest software deal ever.
Right? Ever.
And now that’s peanuts.
And he tried to build the incubator out in Downers Grove or Lisle, right? And, what was it called? I can’t…
Divine Intervention.
Divine Intervention, right? And so in that time frame, that was a huge cutting-edge concept, right?
Oh, totally.
So be an incubator and feed these companies and people… It wasn’t, “Oh, we’re gonna move into cool offices and we’re gonna have a $150,000 website and a CMO and a CTO.” That wasn’t that way. It was scratching and clawing, a lot of people were sweat equity and doing stuff. And that’s changed a lot and I get why. The people who have the money realized that if you plant 10 seeds, one hits and it covers the nine that don’t. It makes pure business sense, but it’s created a level of entrepreneurship that’s very different than starting out in a boot-strapping situation and having to worry about… I mean, I remember, how dumb I was, right?
I remember keeping my paychecks that I would run, right, and I wouldn’t deposit them. I didn’t have direct deposit, I didn’t wanna spend the extra dollar or whatever it was, to do it. I would keep them in my top drawer, right, and I wasn’t paying myself a lot, a couple thousand bucks, and I wouldn’t cash it. I didn’t realize that I just shouldn’t have run the payroll for myself, ’cause I was spending the money on the payroll taxes, right? [chuckle] So it was like being a masochist, right? I’d punish myself and not take the money, but it’d already come out of the account and blah, blah, and the payroll tax dollars. But it’s that level. There aren’t a lot of people, when you’re taking private equity money, that don’t pay themselves. That’s not really the condition of taking the money right, now you may not make as much in some other roles, but you get paid. And that pain and that suffering and that fear, that’s real. And now there’s a lot of… You talked about content being written and blogs and different things, Brian, there’s a lot of people, especially in Silicon Valley, that will see the value of hiring somebody who did a start-up and failed. 20 years ago, you wouldn’t think that you’re more marketable after failing. Never, right?
Never.
Right? Never. I mean, getting fired was a bad thing.
Yeah, oh yeah.
I graduated college in ’94. You didn’t go advertise that, right? Today, “Oh, I had a start-up. Went for 18 months, we burned through $3 million. Can you give me a job for $400,000 a year and some stock?” I mean, it wouldn’t have happened. So the whole world has evolved, and what I’ve tried to do is change with it, and to understand it and not judge it, but just figure out how to change the parameters. So, our vision continually changes. So today, we’re very unique in our space because the overwhelming majority, over 90% of our business is in Chicago. And now as we expand beyond Chicago, it’s how to keep that focus and to realize that employees wanna be part of the core, the mothership, if you will, but they also wanna have the opportunity to go and try new things and experiment. So we’re planning a lot. We opened up our San Francisco office because one of our really long… At the time, she would’ve been with us for about four years or five years, her husband got a transfer to San Francisco and she was gonna resign, and tears, crying, “I don’t wanna leave. He got this opportunity of a lifetime.” And I said, “How about if we open an office for you?” And it’s been two years, it’s done well. And it’s one of those things of, “Do you really believe in your people, or is it lip service?” We think you gotta make the investment.
Well, that’s a remarkable story, and I know if some of our audience isn’t familiar with Tom or LaSalle, there’s plenty of those remarkable stories to go around. And as someone whose business is just a kindergartener, to use your analogy. So, AE is six-years-old and boot-strapped as well, but I think it’s really rare air to ever be sitting across from somebody that’s bootstrapped a company from two, three to a few hundred, and to 50, 60 whatever million dollars it is now. I remember seeing you aways back on Bootstrapping in America, the Tasty Trade guys, you know, all these entrepreneur worlds collide. But I love the fact that you talked about why you didn’t really want a partner, and I can appreciate that. It’s a different set of risks, a different set of stresses that keep me up at 3 o’clock in the morning. But the bootstrapping journey is a fascinating one for people that have never actually done it. And I’m still, like I said, my business is a kindergartener. We’re not even planning for those college years yet.
Well, and it used to be, before ’07, you could do a three-year plan and a five-year plan and you can kind of forecast it out there, and whether you had… Or you were raising money or not, you wanted to see where you’re on that plan. More people that I talk to, they’re doing rolling three and six-month plans, because you just don’t know. And things may change and a different revenue stream presents itself, but it’s… You have to put yourself out there, whether it’s a place like 1871, whether it’s a thing like EO. I don’t know if you’re in that, or YPO. And people, to learn, I think what we’ve lost is everything is about, “What do I get out of it?” Instead of what you give. And I’ve had a lot of people that have said to me, “Oh, we wanna win Culture Awards.” And I said, “I never wanted to win a Culture Award, I didn’t know they existed when I started.” It’s a by-product of wanting to treat people well and retain staff. And the good news is, you get to acknowledge it in employer branding situation.” But five years ago, 10 years ago, employer branding, nobody talked about that.
So to me, it’s about doing things for the right reasons. And I’d say the number one thing that’s allowed us to be successful, aside from getting rid of our hiring mistakes, is wanting to make changes when things are going well. And too often, people make changes when things go wrong. Rightfully so, but it’s too late. This is the team you’ve assembled, ride it out now, is my belief. And when things are good, tweak it so they continue to stay good. And you have certain elements that you keep the same but you tweak it and it’s very similar. I think the sports analogies get over-used, but it’s almost like the New England Patriots, right? I think there’s only two guys that were on the first set of SuperBowl teams, right? Brady and Belichick. Everybody else changes, right, so ownership and two key players. And it sucks to outgrow people and to go through that, but it has. And I’ve had three or four C-level people, that it wasn’t right or we outgrew them and they moved on. And other people rise up and it made sure that you’re building the right organization for everybody.
So switch gears for a second as we start to wind down, and obviously you’re in the talent industry, and the recruiting and staffing industry is all about people.
Sometimes the “Lack of talent” industry.
For sure. So what does Tom Gimbel look for when hiring talent?
I look for people who are smart enough. Right, they don’t have to be, to quote somebody from Boston, “They don’t have to be wickedly smart, they need to be smart enough,” they need to have a really good sense of humor. We’re not curing cancer and building rockets, and… We’re in the people business. So they need to have a really good sense of humor, and they need to have work ethic. Those are the three things that I want, and in there is somewhat easy to manage. I don’t want people that are overly combative, not that they shouldn’t have an opinion, I wanna hear that, but they need to be able to make their point, persuade you or not persuade you, and then go execute. And I don’t like arguing for the sake of arguing, I like arguing because you have a real strong belief and you can either, kinda… Like what you’re talking about with the Method guy at the Inc. 5000, you do the best you can. And if those results hadn’t, I would have been wrong. And you have to live with the consequences.
I don’t think you would have been wrong, [chuckle] but the numbers, the numbers didn’t lie, they certainly helped, for sure. And it was probably one of the most respectful debates I saw, all of last fall.
That’s good to hear. And he’s, Eric, I’ve gotten… Actually, I’d never met Eric before, the founder of Method. And since then, between texts and emails, and… We haven’t gotten together yet, but whenever I’m in California or he’s here, you get an email. I mean, it’s really nice that you meet really good people, and you share stories and you get to know each other and a lot of the journeys are so similar. You don’t know it, if you get stuck in your insular world.
So in preparation for this interview, came across a Wall Street Journal column where you talked about the sophomore slump. Thinking this is gonna be really relevant for our listeners, can you talk to us about maybe tips for how to avoid that?
Yeah. So, we titled it that, “The sophomore slump,” and I was writing it and I was like, “Well, is it your second year, is it sophomore?” And everybody knows sophomore is your second year, but people started… A lot of the initial feedback was, “Oh, so it’s your people right out of college, so they’re in their second year,” and it’s not. It’s for people in the second year on the job. You could be 50-years-old, you could be 25-years-old. The theory is, you come out of the gates blazing, and you’re excited, you’re making change, you wanna make an impact, you’re grinding it out. And you get to a point, and either you killed it, and you get rewarded for it, you did okay, and maybe you get an okay bonus. Or you like it, but you’re sitting there going, “I don’t know if I wanna do it again.” And you kind of fall into this routine. “I have the same title, I’m doing the same job.” And if there is a knock on the millennials, I would say that may be it. Is that the attention span of not wanting to put in the time for an extended period to earn the promotion as, “I did my job. What’s next?”
Well now become better, right? I come and go on the whole Malcom Gladwell 10,000 hours, but there’s some obvious credibility to that. And so the goal is, how do you reinvent yourself to do the same job, the second year, right? And to me, it’s about a lot of the basics of, who did you spend the most time with? Were they the most successful person in the company? How you view a company in your first year and how you view the company in your second year should be different. When you come in, who you think is good may not really be reality at the end of your first year. And the social interactions of the responsibilities, cross-training and learning other departments and really refining your craft, whether you’re in a metrics-driven environment and having more consistency, whether you have a better relationship with your manager, do you want that? Maybe you’ve gotten through the grind of the work and now you can have some social interaction within the organization and develop some relationships that can help you. So there’s a layer of challenges that you can set up for yourself to overcome.
I was meeting with a guy today, he’s Chief Operating Officer of about a $60 million company, and a great attitude, I mean optimistic, upbeat guy, and we’re just talking about the challenges. And he goes, “Yeah,” he’s been at the job for about a year, and he said, “There’s some real challenges here, ’cause there’s some real problems, because I didn’t realize the depths of them.” He goes, “But that’s why they hired me.” Right? And that’s the right mentality. Whenever I hear people say, they come in at a manager, director, C-level person, and they go, “There’s a lot of problems here.” I said, “Well, if there weren’t any problems, you wouldn’t be making what you’re making.” People don’t get paid a lot of money because the work’s easy, they get paid a lot of money because the work’s hard.” And you don’t have the opportunity to grow vertically because the work is easy. So even if at entry-level, you come in making $30,000, $40,000 a year, but there’s a lot of upward mobility because the work’s hard. You know, work that’s easy, you don’t make as much money, and that’s a development teaching thing for people to realize, and some people want that. “I don’t wanna be stretched and pushed. Give me a reliable, consistent number, even if it’s a little bit lower than what I want, I can’t manage the stress.” Okay, there’s nothing wrong with that.
So that’s super insightful, and I’m glad you clarified with the sophomore slump was. Because you first described your company as a sophomore. And we don’t wanna see a slump for LaSalle.
No, we do not wanna see a slump.
In year 19, so.
Yeah. Tell me about it.
As we wrap up, this has been a great interview, I’m so thrilled you could join us. How can our audience learn a little bit more about you, Tom? And then, obviously, also LaSalle?
I’m not sure they wanna… There’s more interesting people than me out there to study up on, but you can follow us. Our website is lasallenetwork.com, Twitter is @lasallenetwork and mine’s @TomGimbel. I write for Inc. Magazine, inc.com, and we’ve been fortunate that we’ve been picked up, as you mentioned, in the Journal and some other stuff. So there’s a decent amount of content that we put out and that I put out.
Well, Tom, thank you so much for being on the Brand Lab Series, and our audience is gonna get a lot out of this fascinating experience and journey as an entrepreneur, as a culture builder, long before people even knew. I mean, I think about Flip at Platinum, and you could wear whatever you wanted, but no one ever used the word culture. I probably didn’t hear the word culture until sometime in the mid-2000s, maybe, if then. So it’s fascinating that you were ahead of the curve.
Well, here’s the question I’ll ask you at my advanced age now is, is there a statute of limitations on being called an entrepreneur?
I don’t think there’s a statute of limitations, but I will say that people overuse the term. It’s kinda like innovation. At one point, it was a word that actually meant something. I think just because people work in co-working spaces don’t make them entrepreneurs, and I think a lot of people think that they aspire to be one, but they don’t know what that comes with. I’ve written a lot about the personal cost of starting and running a business has been, and start-up life isn’t for everyone.
I wrote a piece about why it’s okay to be an employee, better than okay to be an employee. And the role that you play, and the value of supporting, not even an entrepreneur, any CEO, vice-president, director in that journey, and knowing your strengths and what you want, and being able to acknowledge it. Unfortunately, we live in a world where if you’re good at something, everybody says, “You wanna go to do it on your own,” right? And it’s like, you begin to have self-doubt, like, “Maybe I should, I thought I was happy.” Right, this quest for the eternal happiness and eternal money, instead of just being happy and getting good at what you do, and both come.
Yeah, and I think if you put in the hustle and do the right things, some of that stuff will come.
Absolutely.
And then what’s interesting is once it does, it’s kinda like, “Oh,” you know? So Tom, thank you so much for being on the show today.
Great to be with you.
Thanks for coming to 1871, and we’ll catch you with a new episode next week on the Brand Lab Series.
Tags: B2B, Employee Advocacy, Entrepreneurship
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