This week, we are celebrating the release of the new revised and expanded edition of Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family, Barry-Wehmiller Chairman Bob Chapman and Raj Sisodia’s book on Bob and Barry-Wehmiller’s journey to Truly Human Leadership.
On today’s podcast, we want to share a story of Bob and the book’s impact on one particular leader. Jason Lippert is the
President and CEO of Lippert Components, a global supplier of a broad array of highly engineered components for the leading manufacturers of recreational vehicles, automobiles, watercraft and prefab homes. They also operate in adjacent markets, including hospitality, transportation, construction and agriculture.
Lippert and Barry-Wehmiller are very similar in size, both are on their third generation of family leadership. And they both have similar values when it comes to stewarding the lives in their span of care.
On this episode, I have a conversation with Jason about his leadership journey. How he became a Truly Human Leader and what that meant for Lippert Components. How they approach leadership and personal development. How they approach community service and why that's important to their company culture. We also talk about the impact Bob and Everybody Matters had on his leadership and his company.
Transcript
Jason Lippert: We've been around 70 years next year. Started as a family company, and we're publicly traded today. We sold to a public business in 1997 when we were about $100 million.
Today, we've eclipsed $5 billion in revenues, but we're sitting around $4 billion today with about 13,000 team members. We do business in 13 European locations, but most of our business is in North America, with most of it here where we're headquartered in Elkhart, Indiana. We've had probably 40–50% of our total products and revenues come out of this area here in Northern Indiana.
In our products range, largely 40% of our business is recreational vehicle components. We do a lot of critical components for RVs, but we've got less than 10% of our business in boats and supplying to the marine manufacturers. We supply transportation and markets like transit buses and school buses and heavy-duty buses.
We have an aftermarket business that supports both the RV industry and the marine business. Then we've got an automotive aftermarket that we purchased about five years ago. Again, all in revenues are about $4 billion and 40% of it’s RV. The rest of it's those other end markets I spoke of.
Brent Stewart: Are you looking to expand to other markets? Has that been partially why you've been wading, huh, that’s a pun, wading into these other areas?
Jason: Yeah, we started, we were pretty much 90% RV, and when it came to the recession, the financial great recession in 2008–2009, we kind of came out of that and said, we're too heavy into RV to keep getting bigger and hit these cycles like this. So, we got into utility trailers and buses and marine. We did some, our European businesses in 2016, I think is when we started there.
Our aftermarket business was in that last decade. So, over the last decade and a half, we've added these different legs of the stool in. But, I'd say we're not, it's not that we're not looking for new end markets and segments right now.
It's just that we've got a lot of runway to grow in the non-RV segments that we've initiated over the last, call it 15 years. So, we're really continuing to take advantage of the runway that we've got there that's open, and we're going to keep doing that, and we've done 75 acquisitions since I've been leading the company. So, we do a lot of M&A.
Brent: You guys are a third-generation company then. You're the third generation of your family to lead the company. Tell me a little bit about the lineage of getting to you.
Jason: My grandfather, who just passed away at 100 years old, a couple weeks ago, founded the company in ‘56, and really the primary product that he had the idea for was just a galvanized mobile home roofing product for manufactured homes. He came back from the war, didn't have any money, and he found somebody to invest in an idea he had, and he started building galvanized roofs for mobile homes. Did that for a while.
My dad took the business over in '79, took it from 5 million to 100 million in '97, and that's where I came in at '94 and took over in '99.
Like I said, we were acquired by a public business, and they gave us a lot of capital to invest specifically organically, but we started making acquisitions in 2003, and we made some really good ones, and we grew really fast, and they wanted to give us more money for acquisition, so we were doing a good mix between 2003 and 2013 of heavy organic growth and heavy M&A.
Brent: And how long have you been CEO?
Jason: I've been CEO of Lippert since ‘03, and of the whole public company since 2013.
Brent: Tell me a little bit about your leadership journey. When you, obviously being in a family company, it's a little bit different than coming in cold, because you kind of grow up in the business in a sense. You may not pay attention to it, but it's there in the DNA, and it's there around you. When you became involved in the business, tell me what your leadership journey was like.
Jason: When I came to the business, my dad, he kind of threw me into the welding part of our business, so I learned how to weld, and welded for about 18 months on the production lines, learning how to build a product, really gave me a good vantage point to see what our team members go through on the front lines of a manufacturing business, and that's something I didn't learn in college.
I didn't get a lot of management classes and business classes, but that's something that you never learned through books and sitting in a classroom. So that was really, really helpful to get a really good understanding of what's required to make a manufacturing business tick.
Unfortunately, though, in a manufacturing business in the ‘90s, you learn a lot of bad habits. There was a lot of bad things going on. I mean, you just read Everybody Matters and you can kind of, you know, it was the same kind of situation. You know, people were not, everybody was very selfish. Management was selfish. It was about what can you do for me right now?
And when you didn't do something right, it was yelling and screaming and just a lot of bad behavior, toxic behavior. But, you know, I watched it as a welder. I watched it happen and, you just kind of, they don't prepare you for that kind of stuff in school.
So, I just kind of grew into that and I became impatient as a leader and things didn't go my way. It was OK, you fired somebody or you moved them out real quick or you got upset. My leadership was a product of what I saw for, you know, the first few years in the business. And we were growing fast, so I had a very, I was putting 100% of my time in the business. I was sleeping at the plant. So, what I didn't realize early on was how that was impacting other team members that had families and had lives outside of the company.
So, the long and short is I really didn't learn the right way to lead. You know, it was more about winning. And I just categorized it as it was more about winning at all costs versus winning the right way.
And eventually did a lot of pouring into my faith and prayer and got some good insights from God about, like, what my purpose in life was with as many people as we were, as we have to influence and impact in a positive way here.
And then about the same time, I met Bob. Who really helped me understand how to rethink and retool culture and values-based business to use that as a foundation versus, hey, what's it going to take to win today?
And then things of over the last 11 years we've been on this culture journey have been transformational for a lot of leaders in the company, not just myself.
Brent: Was there an inciting incident that kind of led you to that introspection or was it just kind of the culmination of everything or how did that come about?
Jason: You know, Bob had his three revelations, and I had really two. I had one was just a lot of prayer, like I said, a lot of thoughtful prayer and intentional prayer on, you know, God, what's my purpose? And, you know, and then, like I said, right about the time I was spending multiple months in prayer, it was an invitation to sponsor, you know, a leadership event here in the community that a friend of mine brought a thousand leaders in, and I had received the Truly Human Leadership TED Talk, and I listened to that, and I put all my money toward either church or family ministries and family charities, family-oriented charities, children's charities around the area.
So, I'm really thoughtful about where our money goes. And when he said, hey, I need you to sponsor this leadership conference for five figures, I was like, that's not where we put our money. And this guy is very persistent.
He's a good friend of mine, and he kept coming back and saying, hey, I'll get anybody you want to speak. Just tell me who you want here. I'll get it done.
I just need. I really need you to sponsor. So, I said, well, if you can get Bob Chapman, because I've heard a thing or two about those guys, and I've read his book, I'll sponsor.
He calls me up the next day and he goes, hey, I got him. I said, got who? He said, I got Bob. He's coming to speak, so I'm going to send you the sponsorship forms and we can get this thing moving. I said, fair enough. But that event led to me and about 50 of my top leaders in the business.
We had two and a half hours with Bob after the speaking engagement that we were both involved with. We got to ask him literally. I had everybody read the book.
I said, we're changing things. I said, Bob's going to give us two hours of his time, so come with questions because we got to figure out how to do this in reality, not just think about it.
Brent: You know, you're going through this moment of introspection. You've probably been driving yourself very hard. And then you're kind of having this crisis of figuring out if what's your purpose in this or what is the purpose of all this. And then you hear this TED talk and then you get to talk to Bob in person. What were some of the things that really resonated with you that you were hearing at the time from Bob?
Jason: You know, I think a lot of it was just a value-centered culture where values are the North Star. And, you know, we've got to coach people up to the values and treat people like human beings. Dignity kept coming up in those conversations.
You know, these people, another thing that resonated a ton for me was, hey, how you treat these people is how they enter the house when they get home in the evening.
And it really got me to stop and think about, man, if we're, you know, creating bad days for a lot of people because of the way we treat them, it's one thing if they've got personal circumstances. It's another thing if we're creating those bad feelings because we're just treating them poorly or treating them unfairly or we're not leading them well.
They're going home and, you know, how do you expect them to carry that out at home? They're frustrated, they're depressed, they're anxious, they've got all sorts of negative feelings. And, you know, I started thinking about, man, how does that play out in the lives of little kids?
And that crystallized for me one day. Bob came back and wanted to see some of the things that we were doing in our business a couple of years after we first met. He gave a little bit of a talk.
I talked for a little bit in front of one of our plants. And he asked a question to have some people get some testimonials about how the culture’s made a difference in their lives. And he said, some gentleman stood up and he's like, I've only been working for Lippert for four months because I do all the cooking at home.
And he said, my six-year-old daughter came up to me while I was cooking. And she goes, dad, why don't you come home from work angry anymore? And it was at that moment that the impact that you can have, especially on children, because of the way the parent comes home, either in a good, real good space, because they've been led well all day, and really being taught to lead themselves well, or they're being led poorly all day, and they're leading themselves poorly, because nobody's giving them the encouragement or the push to be better. Those are some of the things that really stuck out in our early conversations.
Brent: When you had those 50 leaders come with you to that event, and you told them to prep and ask questions, and read the book and all this, after the event and you had that time with Bob, what was their reaction to that? Were there any skeptics? Were they all in? Were they confused? What was the reaction?
Jason: The reaction was, man, we got a lot of work to do, because all the questions that we were asking, we weren't doing any of those things.
And then Bob had very, you know Bob well, I mean, he's had very specific reactions and comments and direction, you know, on how to, how to tackle any of these questions and problems and challenges that we thought we might have. So, that was, it was really helpful from that perspective.
I think people felt a little bit of relief that, oh, I've got some answers now. Bob always fell back to values and caring and just giving people your best and leading well.
Brent: So, you go back and you have these discussions and you realize, holy cow, we got a lot to do. What was the work from that point? What was the work that you guys started doing to get to where you wanted to be?
Jason: Yeah, so over the next 10 years from that moment, it was a lot of incremental steps. I always kind of categorize our journey as things, certain steps became very crystal clear. We took them and then another step would kind of come into view, and we’d take that step.
All we've been doing for the last 10 years is just taking steps, and our culture has been evolving and growing as a result of, we started with just coming up with some core values and saying, hey, what values do we want to live by here at the business and rally our teams around so that we can say, hey, what values do we want to live by here at the business and rally our teams around so that we can say, hey, look, this is who we are and these are our values. If you can't align to these then you just can't stay here because it's not going to work. Once we got down the values journey, we started having to move some people out of the business because it was clear that they didn't want to align to the values, do some of the hard work that was required as a result of, hey, look, we're going to make the culture work.
That's going to be a lot of hard work. Some people just wanted to do what they've been always doing because it's easier. What we were pushing people toward was, hey, look, you're going to lead yourself differently. You're going to have to lead people differently. We eventually came up with leadership values. We're like, if you want to be a team member here, you got to align to the core values.
If you want to be a leader here, you've got to align to these leadership values that we have and the core values because let's face it, most people got promoted in the past in a business like ours because they were the fastest welder, fastest assembler. They just knew a lot. They've been here for 20 years. They were a nice person. They show up on time every day. I mean, you can pick a hundred different reasons people got promoted.
None of those reasons meant they were or defined leadership in a real way. So, we redefined leadership for our leaders and said, now, if you want to lead here, it's not good enough just to be, know a lot. We're not good enough to be on time every day or be a generally a good person.
You're going to have to work on all these leadership values. It was things like being humble and coachable. You've got to be a motivator. You got to be an effective communicator. You got to be a servant leader. I mean, we're teaching them all these concepts and saying, hey, we're going to rate you on this stuff and where you need work, that's all we want you to do is work on those things.
If motivation doesn't come naturally for you, watch a YouTube video. Here's some resources. We want you to motivate your team members, things that they didn't have to do before, because we just said, hey, look, show up to work every day, make sure the work gets done and win.
Brent: How did that lead into forming your own leadership academy?
Jason: Core values was a step. Our leadership values for our leaders was a step. Putting leadership coaches in the business so that we could teach our frontline men and women what leadership looks like, instead of just saying, hey, learn it on your own or do the best you can.
I tell people all the time, you want culture to really flourish, you've got to have resources there. You can't just put it on human resources’ plate. They've got enough to do, and culture is complex and hard and going to require resources. You need people for that. We hired leadership coaches. We eventually hired a couple chaplains. We hired somebody for the leadership academy because we had, after six or seven years, we had people knocking on our door, whether it was through literally showing up here and asking how they can learn and glean from our culture and ask some questions to messaging on social media or just email and things like that.
It became really clear at that point in time, part of God's vision he had, I think, for us is to have more impact than just the 13,000 team members and their families here. If we can help other businesses, much like Bob has, start their culture journeys and start impacting team members and their families in a real positive way, and ultimately they might impact other companies because of the example they're setting out there.
We get to a point eventually where nobody's going to want to work for a company that doesn't have this type of culture. What I found, and I think what you've probably found at Barry-Wehmiller is, is that once the light bulb turns on, it never turns off. You don't wake up one day and say, yeah, I think we're going to go back to the way we were before. That is just not an option. As we turn the light bulbs on for other companies, I think that it can have a serious impact on the world over time, as this ripple just continues to go.
Brent: I mean, you guys have done a lot of acquisitions. We've done a lot of acquisitions. And one of the things that we talk about in those terms is, people come from where they come from. They have all these experiences and all this baggage that they carry when they come into your particular family. And so, you have to meet them where they are.
But I don't think people ever say they want to go back. But I think that there is some of these qualities, these poor leadership qualities, that you described growing up around and seeing. It's hard to get, you know, it's just like growing up in a home where parents aren't modeling great behaviors. When you're growing up in leadership environments where great behaviors aren't modeled, it's easy to not want to be that way.
But then it's also easy to fall into those traps as well, to go back to the old way of doing things as well because it was so ingrained in you for such a long time. You know, like, I was on the line, and I was yelled at and then I yelled at the next guy, and he yelled at, you know, like, it's hard to not do that anymore.
Jason: Yes. Especially when you're under pressure and you've got financial metrics to hit or you've got a production quota to meet, you know, it gets, there's pressure in a business environment because it's survival in a lot of respects. If you don't hit those metrics or quotas, then the business starts to fail. But it's how you hit those metrics and quotas by enabling and empowering and really encouraging people to lead themselves and lead their teams really, really well. You get exponential growth on those metrics that you're really not thinking about if you're just doing business like we did in the past.
Brent: That sense of wanting to keep improving and wanting to be better is what you hope is a good quality in one of your leaders, too. Because even when you fall, if you may fall back on something, the hope is that they would have the self-realization to grow from that experience and do better each time.
It's funny because my parents are awesome, awesome people. As you get older, you see, when you hold your parents up, you see the chinks in their armor, you know? And then you want to not ... There are behaviors that you don't want to repeat in your own family. And that's just like, that's why parenting is such a good metaphor for leadership.
Jason: Yes. I think how we've skinned that cat here, the one of the learnings. And again, it was another step here in the last few years that we've decided to take is that, you know, to address that exact problem that you're talking about in people is get them on a growth track.
If you're growing as a human being, you're eventually going to realize that you've got some things to work on. But what's the problem? Most people, they don't have a growth plan. They don't have a, you know, especially you look at manufacturing, you know, blue collar workforce or even, you know, the white collar workforce. I didn't have a leadership or, you know, personal growth plan for years. But what we're doing today is, you know, we've got a goal of 100% of our team members to have personal growth plans.
Because if they're growing personally, they're going to become better. They're going to lead themselves better. They're going to lead teams better. You know, you're more motivated as a human being when you've got growth in front of you and you're writing down your goals and your action plan and in some cases have accountability partners around the business or family that are going to help you go after those goals. But most people are not writing down their goals for their own personal growth. So, we've thought a great step to take, like I said a few years ago, is get every human being in the business growing.
And then they're just going to bring more energy and passion and positivity to the business and that's going to be good for business. What I found, too, is that I just had a listening session today, which was another step. I do it with one plant every week with other leaders from the front lines up to their top management. It's just great. And one of the things we talk about is just, you know, hey, what are some of your goals? And people light up when they talk about, you know, their personal goals. A lot of these goals are oriented around, I mean, I want my family life to be better. I want a better relationship with my wife, a better relationship with my kids. I just want to eat dinner with my kids as a family with no phones for three nights a week.
I mean, you wouldn't believe some of the goals that come out of this, but they're ultimately going to improve the family unit. And I think that that's ultimately what this world needs the most right now is, stronger family values, stronger family leadership. And I think we can help do that as a business by just getting people learning how to grow.
Brent: So, you guys are not just helping your teammates plot professional goals, it's life goals as well.
Jason: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think, I think honestly, I tell everybody all the time, I think the personal side of it's more important than the career side. I think, you know, it's hard to get a career. Well, first of all, nobody's ever going to care more about your business than their own personal life. So, get them ordered right, because I think if you get the personal life moving and growing, then they can wake up and say, OK, one of the things in my personal life is my career. What career goals do I want to have? What do I want to do to get better at work?
Because so many people just come in to work every day just punching the clock, and they're here to get a paycheck and earn a living and go home. But if you can get them growing on the personal side and then open up, hey, look, how do we grow your career here? What do you want to do that you're not doing? You just get people opened up to those things. I think it makes the family unit better, it makes the business better, everybody wins.
Brent: What you're describing to me is you guys are creating this, which is something we talk about a lot, this environment of care that extends to somebody beyond their time in your four walls. To where you're providing a safe environment for them because you're taking in the whole of their life into account, not just the 40-hour week life. I bet a HR person's head has exploded by now.
Jason: Good. We need to challenge what we're doing because what we're doing in large isn't working in most businesses.
Brent: Jason, when you guys bring new companies, we call them adoptions. I'm sure you guys think about them similarly. When you acquire new companies, when you bring new companies into the family, what does that look like for you guys? How do you bring them into this culture that may be so foreign to them that they've not experienced and may not be comfortable with? How does that work?
Jason: Yeah, so we've got a culture playbook, and that's the first thing we launch when we land on day one. And it's exactly that. It's like we're bringing in the family, but we've got values, culture is important.
Most companies we've acquired, they might have values, they might not, but there's no structured, in the smaller businesses that we buy, there's generally no real structured cultural direction. It's just, hey, look, do a good job, be good leaders. There's no depth to it; they're trying hard.
So, we just bring the structure in to say, look, again, these are our core values. And our expectation is, if you can't align the core values as a team member, or your team members can't, then the expectation is we coach them up or we have to move them out of the business. Because ultimately, they're going to make good people leave.
I know Bob's got a little bit of a different philosophy on that, on “circle the bus.” You know, until they do pick it up. And we do do that. But at the end of the day, I don't want good people leaving, and toxic people that just aren't in a spot where they want to play in the culture world the way our expectations are aligned to our values and leader qualities. We have to make tough decisions here.
But at the end of the day, we do rally them in. We talk to every human being in the first week, one-on-one, so we don't talk to a big group of people and say, OK, this is it. We're very intentional in making sure that people know that we care. People know that this is real, that we're serious about culture and good leadership. and the things that we're going to help them work on over the coming months as they integrate.
Again, having a playbook, so it's all written down. They don't have to guess what it is that we're trying to do around making sure cultures are aligned. Like I said, we've done 75 acquisitions over the last 25 years. What I can tell you is that, and we just finished a couple here in April, the people come back and they're like, this is amazing, didn't know this was possible to do in business. Thanks for all the resources you're doing from the coaching aspect where we've got coaches going into those facilities, coaching frontline men and women on what good leadership looks like and what our expectation is for a leader in this company.
The community service we do, that was another step we took. 125,000 hours of community service every year. Every plant's got to do three service events; it's really simple. But we've got four people on staff that do all the planning for those events.
So, all they have to do is show up, figure out where they want to go. Our staff will do the planning, and all they got to do is show up and serve. They do the serving, they look at the ----, the chaplaincy program, the coaching, the values, they look at all this and like, holy cow, this is like serious. This is like what real culture should look like. And it's good for everybody.
Brent: I was going to ask you about the Lippert Cares programs. How did you guys build that? And what is the impact that you've seen from that?
Jason: I think first and foremost, I think God wired us to serve. Like that's not up for debate. And when we serve, we're fulfilling that purpose. It's like we feel full. We feel like this is like amazing. So, I think the most difficult part is for, again, for our 13,000 team members working in manufacturing plants, assembling products.
A lot of them hadn't served in a meaningful way. They might have done something to their church or whatever, or coach a baseball team. But at the end of the day, to come to a food pantry and bring 40 people and serve side-by-side, or go clean up a park with a group of 30 co-workers, or go to an elderly home and sit with people in a nursing home, those kinds of things, I think, were maybe not as common.
So, we've made it really easy for them to just, all they're going to do is show up. And we're like, hey, bring your spouse, bring your kids, come alone, whatever you want to do, try to make it easy. And I think that was the hardest thing for people, at least that I've talked to a lot of people that have gone on events with and speaking around the company.
People will tell me, it's not that I didn't want to serve, I just didn't know how. So, we make it easy. Because all they have to do is show up and engage for an hour and a half. And they walk away. And I think that's some of the transformation you're seeing in our people in the company. I think it's like our leadership action plans or personal and professional growth plans, serving is one of the reasons people say, you know what, I worked at five or six other businesses, I'm never leaving this place because they've introduced me to this, and we go serve.
And it's one of the things I love about this company. So, we all know that low turnover is good for the business. Low turnover creates efficiencies, it creates good quality, good safety records, innovation, all sorts of things that happen when retention goes up and turnover goes down. So again, it's helping the business too. It's not just helping transform people's lives.
Brent: You said something there that was really fascinating, that people just didn't know how to serve. And that's an interesting thing to think about, not just with working in our communities, but also when it comes to interacting with other people in the business, with the other team members. Talk about how that affected that learning how to serve outside the plant helps people learn how to serve others inside the plant.
Jason: Yeah, I think it's just that it's one of our leader qualities. It's servant leadership, and a lot of people didn't know what that meant. They'd heard the term maybe before. Serving people outside definitely helps you understand what serving people is. It's just about what we teach people. It's just about not putting yourself first. It's like put others first. You don't have to be a leader in the company to be a servant leader. I think that's the other big aha moment for people. It's like, oh, I'm a servant leader and I'm not leading anybody. I'm just leading myself well. I'm going and serving other people and that makes me a servant leader.
When I'm in the plant and I'm working on a team as an individual contributor, I serve the team members around me, that helps the team. So, I think just getting that concept fluid, so everybody understands it and practices it, it just makes the business better. But I think arguably it makes a team member a better human being as a result.
We take care of a lot of our problems and a lot of our own problems and a lot of our anxieties and thoughts of depression and things like that when we can learn how to put our focus on other people as opposed to always thinking about ourselves. I think it helps from a mental health aspect. I think there's all sorts of benefits to learning how to be a true servant leader. But that's why it was important that we put it in our five leader qualities.
Brent: Well, like you guys say and like we say, too, business can be a force for good. This is how business can be one of the most important forces for good, by knowing that the way we lead impacts the way people live and going out, going home, going out into communities with having that solid base every day.
Jason: Yeah. When we have the Leadership Academy red carpet rollouts here once a quarter with businesses coming in, that's one of the highlights we talk about is teach them how to do that. That's always one of the big takeaways when other companies come in, and then of course, we do a ton of social media and things like that.
So, there's all sorts of good examples out there where people look at it, and they don't even need to come and talk to us. They're like, oh, we can do that, that sounds, or hey, Lippert's doing this, other companies are starting to do it, maybe we should think about figuring out how to serve our community as well. So just being a good example, I think makes a huge difference.
Brent: Jason, we were talking about the growth plans, the personal growth plans earlier. What's your growth plan?
Jason: Well, so I've got personal and business goals, but again, sticking to the personal side, one of my goals this year was to memorize 30 Bible verses over the course of the year. I hadn't memorized. I read the Bible every day, but I hadn’t memorized scripture, and it was just a step I knew I needed to take and started doing it. It's fantastic for my faith and just my personal life.
Working on some stuff at home with patience with my kids and just learning more self-control and some steps I have there to practice as I leave here after 10–12 hours a day some days and go home without much gas in the tank and figuring out. I've got two 13-year-old boys and a 17-year-old boy and a 21-year-old daughter at home. Sometimes you walk into the house and there's some pretty interesting stuff going on, and you have to be able to exude a little bit of self-control. Working on that.
From a business standpoint, I've got all sorts of good business goals. But I share those with my teammates when we sit in listening sessions like we did today. They share theirs; I share mine.
They always ask me what mine are. So, we just get in this good habit of writing down goals and sharing them. We call them leadership action plans. So, we just have a two-sided card where they can put their personal goals on one side and their business goals on the other. Most team members keep it on them or keep it around their workstation or things like that, because we talk about this stuff at work.
Brent: Thanks very much for being a partner with us and trying to change the way people view these things. Is there any hopes for the future that you have or anything in closing that you could just say about what your hopes for things are going forward?
Jason: Yeah. Well, I think going back to when Bob initially inspired us, I always think back, especially as I'm talking to other businesses, like the impact that you can have by setting the right example in culture and leadership.
That example that Bob had for us inspired us to do some pretty amazing things. I would argue that we're not doing some of these things, or most of them, or all of them, without Bob's example and Barry-Wehmiller's example. I tell people all the time, don't underestimate the impact you can have. Because look at how we impacted us, and we've impacted hundreds of other companies. We've impacted thousands of people here.
I don't know how many we've impacted at other companies, but that all rolls back through the impact that Barry-Wehmiller and Bob had on us. So, I'm really optimistic about the future because I think businesses are not going to have a choice over time because of the digital world and how fast this stuff spreads and experiences people get at companies like ours. They're not going to want to go and work for a place that treats you like garbage.
They're just not, because they know they don't want to deal with it. They'd rather, it's clear in study show and the data shows that people would rather make a little less money and be treated really, really well than make a little bit more money and get run into the ground every day. So, I'm hopeful that this ripple continues to keep moving and touching other companies and other leaders, and it just becomes part of how people and CEOs run their businesses through better leadership models and culture models like the one we've got. So, thanks for the inspiration.