June 30, 2026 – Deliberate Culture Dane Bruce Hudson and People Profit Clark Ingram

Intro 1 0:04
Broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration Award-winning School for Startups Radio, where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk, or passion. Jim Beach.

Jim Beach 0:25
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. I hope you’re having a great day out there, saving the country, saving the world. As a matter of fact, I believe that us entrepreneurs are the essence of America, and the thing that got us where we are, and what makes America so great and unique, the ability to go out and start a business easily and quickly, so different from other countries, that’s not true in so many places, it takes a month, in France we can go out there and one day create a business, get the EIN number, get the state license, and you are off and running within one day. It’s an incredible thing, and it has built America. The fact that for 250 years we have gone and based our economy on small business and hired small businesses to do projects and just built a country around small business, and we are the essence. And I’m excited that this is the birthday week on our shorter show. We have a show called Minutes, which are, guess how long we are doing a series this week on why America is the greatest place in the world to do business. We are doing that, airing that for you, Friday, the 54 minute version on Friday, so that you can hear that, because it’s just so important that we celebrate and acknowledge the fact that small business is the heart of America, and we need to have tax policy and other HR policies that are conducive to small business success, and that’s not the case. So, we need to fight for it during the elections. No one talks about us small business owners, and that is the problem. Anyway, I do want to wish happy birthday to America this week. It is the 250 birthday, also known as the semi quincentennial, semi quincentennial, I had to look it up, and it’s not as hard to say as you might think. The basis of the word is centennial 100 like the bicentennial. We had that back in 76 I remember it as a kid, but now we have the semi Quinn centennial, and what it is, it’s the quarter 1000 birthday, is the way they are phrasing it. Semi Quinn means the quarter, or the, yeah, the quarter of the 1000 years. So we’re not saying 250 we’re saying a quarter of 1000 when we say semi quincentennial. I looked it all up, and anyway, it’s a great word to say. You should practice it semi quincentennial. You will enjoy that on the long weekend. So, anyway, happy birthday America. Thanks, small business. Great guests today, Dane Hudson up first, talking about discipline beats vision, and then Clark Ingram from Churn HR. We’re going to have a great conversation about the cause of all turnover. It’s a great interview as well. Thanks for being with us. We’ll get started in just a second. Semi Quinn centennial, you

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Jim Beach 4:16
again. Thank you so much for being with us today. Welcome back to the show. Very excited to introduce another great guest. Please welcome Dane Hudson to the show. He has had a very successful career. He has been a CEO for the last 20 years or so in different industries and having different experiences. He has combined all of this into a new book that we’re excited to learn about, called Discipline Beats Vision: How to Be the Leader Your Company Needs, starting Monday. Dane, welcome to the show. How you doing?

Dane Bruce Hudson 4:51
I’m fantastic, Gene. Thank you very much for inviting me on. I’m thrilled to be here.

Jim Beach 4:56
Well, it is our pleasure. You’re calling in from gorgeous Sydney.

Dane Bruce Hudson 5:01
I am. It’s 6am in the morning, so that’s okay. It’s only cutting into my gym time, but all good.

Jim Beach 5:08
Oh, well, I’m sorry, I’m costing you some push-ups. So, tell us about the new book. I love the title, especially the starting Monday part at the end. Tell us about the book.

Dane Bruce Hudson 5:20
So, I might go back a little bit, Jim, if that’s okay. I, as you said, I’ve had a pretty interesting career. I’ve been a CEO five times for five years each, so about 25 years, and lots of industries. I’ve moved country 11 times, lived in a lovely United States three different times for 10 years. So I know your country very well, and yet I’ve been able to stay married for 38 years, so that’s probably my greatest achievement with all the travel and all the challenges, but about 10 years ago I thought, gosh, I’ve had a wonderful and interesting career, I shouldn’t just start writing things down, because I’ve always enjoyed creating leaders. My wife always called me the king or the queen maker, and so I started to.. I’m also an ex-booz Allen consultant, so I started creating PowerPoint pages that helped me sort of train people and mentor people, and all of a sudden I blinked, and it was 1000 pages long, literally, and I’ve used that to mentor 150 CEOs over the last six years and train 900 other leaders, C-level leaders in universities or leadership programs, etc. And everyone kept telling me, “Write a book, write a book, and that’s what I’ve done. So, this discipline beats vision, and I am chronically disciplined, and it served me well in life, and so what the book about is helping other leaders understand that actually your vision is amazing and important, but it’s discipline that gets you to the finish line and helps you scale.

Jim Beach 6:55
So you say you’re amazingly disciplined. Give us the examples.

Dane Bruce Hudson 6:59
One of these odd people that, for the last 30 odd years, has got up at 5o’clock in the morning, if not early, and gone to the gym. I’ll do the red eye overnight flight from – we just came back from living in Singapore for 10 years – but I’d fly from Singapore to Europe for meetings. I’d land at 5:30am and go straight to the gym and get some exercise to wake myself up for the day, so that’s probably the best example of being disciplined from a health standpoint, or waking up, but the other piece is I love the analogy, I’m an engineer, but I love the analogy of Newton’s third law of motion, for every action there’s an equal and opposite

Jim Beach 7:41
reaction,

Dane Bruce Hudson 7:43
exactly. So, as a leader, the team are watching you constantly. Every one of your actions is and behaviors is multiplicative, and so you need to understand, am I getting the reaction from my team that I, that I want, and that’s a great example of discipline, whereby you know you behave and you lead in a way that generates a reaction from your team that you, that you want, not something that you don’t want. So, I think that’s a reasonable example of what discipline leadership is all about.

Jim Beach 8:18
Can you give us a workplace example of how the discipline helps perfect,

Dane Bruce Hudson 8:27
so I talk a lot in my book about the concept of shadow of the leader, and shadow the leader just means your positional power, and so those of us with children would know that our children copy us from a very early age, and they become sort of mini me’s quite, quite quickly. Same thing happens in the workplace, so the team are watching you constantly for cues about values and behaviors, and so if you are one of these leaders that constantly lose their temper, yell at people, get frustrated, attack people that might verbally attack people, etc. You’ll see that multiplied in the organization. People will see that as, as appropriate behavior, because the CEO is doing that. And so, as a disciplined leader, you need to have great self-control in terms of how you respond to issues, another example would be I spent a lot of time, I said, working in Asia, and I’ve probably been to India about 60 times, and in that country they’re watching the lead more closely than just about any other country, and so you need to be very careful about what you say, how you say things, because that’ll actually set them in a direction that you may not want them to go in.

Jim Beach 9:46
That is fascinating. All right, walk us through the five industries that you’ve been the CEO of.

Dane Bruce Hudson 9:52
So, I started off in packaging, and this probably set me on a trajectory that helped me well. Absolute trajectory that got me to where I’m today. I left university, and I was recruited by the second richest guy in Australia, and he didn’t know what to do with me. He had packaging factors, corrugated boxes, making paper, and so at the age of the ripe age of 22 you may be general manager of a business that was turning over $5 million a year, and it was just, and I reported through to him for three years, and that was just a wonderful life experience. So, it’s packaging, then I moved into consulting for a number of years, that wasn’t a CEO role, was Booz Allen for about six years. The fast food industry, Young Brands, my favorite company, they’re the global owner of KSC Pizza Taco Bell, love that, love that company a great deal

Jim Beach 10:46
today.

Dane Bruce Hudson 10:47
Actually, I did not

Jim Beach 10:54
think

Dane Bruce Hudson 10:56
that doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s a very

Jim Beach 10:59
an equity firm.

Dane Bruce Hudson 11:01
Yeah, yeah,

Jim Beach 11:02
got to be a turnaround firm of some kind. They say they bring back the old red roof buildings and everything.

Dane Bruce Hudson 11:08
Good luck with that. Good luck with that. Yeah, Pete Cars been a bit of a noose around their neck, to be honest. So I loved it. I was there for 12 years, and I ran, I ran the KFC business in southern Africa. I was also the global international CFO. Coming out of that, I was a CEO of one of Australia’s largest wine companies. Sounds good on paper, but very challenging. I had the.. we had many, about 15,000 acres of vineyards. We had about eight wineries, made 160 million liters of wine a year, and Jim, I had the pleasure of being the CEO when the share price dropped by 97% and that was well, I wasn’t thrilled with my, my picture on the front page of the paper, and my salary underneath it, that’s for sure. Did I make some dumb decisions? A few, but not enough to drop the share price by 97% The industry was in the tough spot. Australia was making too much wine. There’s a lot, a lot of challenges. I got the share price back up by the time I left, but that was a, that was an amazing learning experience. And I, I train a lot of my CEOs, that one of the things you need to do is, you need to be, you need to have grit, which is being proactive, so that’s actually making a decision. I can work my way through this issue, but you also need resilience, and resilience only comes from scar tissue, and heck, I got a lot of scar tissue with that wine roll to definitely put me in good stead. Then the next role I was CEO of ISS, which is facility services, so the US listeners might know Delaware North, Compass, and Sodexo, European companies. This was cleaning, catering, lots and lots of people, again like the Young Brands experience. I ran the business in Australia with 25,000 people, and then I ran Asia with 200,000 people, and that was an amazing life experience as well. And then I now am a founder, a six year founder of my own company, which is called Impactful Leadership, where we mentor and help CEOs on the journey. So that’s probably my, my list. Jim,

Jim Beach 13:19
do you know Loy Weston from Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Dane Bruce Hudson 13:24
No, it might have been after, after me. I left in 2006 to 2006 so maybe 70s,

Jim Beach 13:31
80s with Japan.

Dane Bruce Hudson 13:36
Oh, wow. Okay, I probably just missed him. I joined, I joined in 1994

Jim Beach 13:42
How do you get such great jobs, especially right out of the bat? You had amazing career jumps. What’s the secret to getting such great offers?

Dane Bruce Hudson 13:54
Actually, that’s a really interesting one, Jim. I reflect on that because actually I always got my second choice in life, except for my wife, I always got my second choice. I recruited for a number of companies coming out of engineering, and actually this job I got when in the packaging industry was my second choice. There was, I think, it was BHP was my first choice, that the largest miner, one of the largest miners in the world now, and they were back then, but it actually worked out fabulously well. But the thing is, what I say, Jim is, you need to create options in life. I love the quote, the more I think it was Arnold Palmer, the more now Gary play it, but the more I practice, the luckier I get, and so I say to leaders all the time, you’ve got to create options in life, and so I have never been the smartest person in the room ever, I’ve been smart enough, but never been the smartest person in the room, but what I did is I’ve always. Been conscientiously smart, smart, so I’ve always been in the mix of smart of people that are reasonably intelligent, and it’s not through inherent smarts, it’s by working my backside off, and so I really encourage people, but coming out of university, grades create options when you’re in the workplace, working hard and being focused on what’s in front of you, on your terminal, on the desk creates options, respecting your boss and doing your best job. Or the next one would startups, which I’ve been working in for the last six years. It’s you’ve obviously got to have the right idea, but you’ve got to be a fantastic leader. The thing is that I think the stat is that 50% of startups fail within five years. We would all know that number is probably closer to 80 to 90% because a lot of the businesses don’t even get registered, and they could be great businesses, but actually what breaks them is more the leadership issue than the product

Jim Beach 16:00
issue. How do you establish a culture of deliberateness in a new business? Say, as you bring in your fourth, fifth, sixth employee,

Dane Bruce Hudson 16:14
so most of the time culture evolves, so if you don’t do anything to create a culture, it will, it will evolve to actually end up a certain way. Okay, what you should do is be deliberate in the culture that you want to create in the company. So, number one, Jim, is to establish what are the values of the operating principles that we want in this business? One of the first questions I ask my clients, and I would actually throw out to listeners, is that can you articulate the three or four values of your company today, I can guarantee that 60% of leaders, even CEOs, cannot. I’ve done this test hundreds and hundreds of times, and it always amazes me. Companies create these values, they put them as posters on the wall, and then people forget them. Now, remembering them is step one. Actually, living by them is step two. And so you need to be deliberate in thinking about how they’re going to reinforce value one, how am I going to reinforce value two. And that’s something you should do with your leadership group, and ensure that the decisions you make use the values as a filter, so that’s the foundation. Your values need to be your filter. Then, in terms of the culture, you should think, what sort of culture do we want in this company? What’s going to actually facilitate us scaling and being successful? What are the elements? So, an example would be Jeff Bezos early on he used secondhand doors as desks to send a message of frugality, very clever. So, what are you doing in your business if frugality is an important part? That’s, that’s, that’s validating and driving frugality. So, that’s what I say, Jim, is think about your values, they’ve got to be the foundation. What are you doing to reinforce those values? What culture do you want, and what are the actions that you need to put in place to actually create that deliberate culture?

Jim Beach 18:32
How do you communicate with impact? Do you have a chapter in the book on that? Communicate with impact. Please help me with that.

Dane Bruce Hudson 18:41
So, the first thing is when I think about my career, and I was fortunate in that I haven’t had a wonderful corporate career, and I saw some amazing leaders, a lot of amazing CEOs. When I reflect on how CEOs speak, it’s a unique way, generally unique way, particularly the ones that are very disciplined and impactful. So, the first part of that chapter talks about if you’re the CEO, these are some of the characteristics and approaches you should use in speaking. So, number one, as bizarre as this sounds, if you’re the CEO, speak last. Bizarre to say that in terms of communication, the first suggestion is speak last, because the second you speak as the leader, there’s a stake in the ground. Now, in lots of cultures, like lots of cultures, like the US, Australia, UK, Western cultures, your team are still likely to speak up and maybe disagree with you, a lot of other cultures they may not do that, but number one is speak last. Number two, a superpower a leader needs to have is be a simplifier, they need to be able to listen to a problem that’s a long story, and then actually reduce that to what’s the root cause, it’s a. Often easier to describe the root cause than it is the solution, so you need to be careful about trying to simplify the solution too much. And then also, within that chapter I took, I provide a very quick presentation skills program. I’ve done presentation skills about 20 times in my corporate career, and you can never do it enough, because we spend a lot of time presenting to small audience and large audiences, and the last element in that chapter, Jim, is actually how to, how to dismiss people, how to do a restructuring. Every leader will actually go through a point where they reduce 10 to 30% of their staff. I’ve done that probably 20 or 30 times of my career. Tragically, you need to know how to do that. So, I talk about how you do that in that chapter as well.

Jim Beach 20:48
Who wouldn’t tell us? How do you do that?

Dane Bruce Hudson 20:50
Number one, own it. So, there’s some beta media here in Australia, and a global CEO was actually in Milan, and this is what the media says. So, I’m not sure how, if there’s any element of truth in this, it’s pretty poor, poor form. But the CEO was away in Milan when the organization reduced 20% of its staff. That’s just wrong. If you’re the CEO, firstly, you’ve got an, you’ve got to know what the objective is that you’re trying to achieve with the cost, with the cost reduction. Are we reducing staff because of a division that’s not performing? Do we need to reduce costs to increase our runway? What are we actually targeting, and what’s the outcome that we want? That’s number one. Then you go through, okay? Who are we? Who are we removing? How, and that’s something the CEO also needs to be involved in. And how are we doing it? Time Q and A, all those sort of things. Don’t ever give away your responsibility for restructuring. Don’t ever do that,

Jim Beach 21:59
everything, because the old man, all these days, have you seen that?

Dane Bruce Hudson 22:04
Yeah, that’s just that’s just horrible. That’s, I think, that’s, that’s, that’s horrible. And the last thing I might add, there, Jim, is that the final point in this is revving up the survivors. You need to keep the survivors, the survivors are the ones that are generally you’re keeping them because they’re your best, so the last thing you want is to actually go through restructuring, then your best people quit. So you need to do that, that town hall or hand speech, which is I’m so sorry, we’ve got some great friends today, so that’s the, that’s the sadness piece, disappointment piece. However, I’m extremely excited about the future of the company. A leader is the person of hope. The people are there because of you as the leader. Tough to do when you just restructure the business and reduce 20 or 30% but critical that you rev the organization up for the future, and then you go around and you embrace the stars, you have one on one with the stars, and you go, hey, hey, Jim, you’re doing an amazing job, there’s a great future here, please, if you have any issues, come, come and talk to me,

Jim Beach 23:20
and then dealing with the board,

Dane Bruce Hudson 23:24
so this is probably the number one area that I work with my clients on. The first thing they want to talk about is Dane. How do I manage my board always? And so the first point is, I say them, Jim, you need to understand their priorities versus your priorities. Their list of priorities are in this order: number one, risk mitigation, and that often means them protecting their personal reputation. Secondly, it’s their fiduciary responsibility to their investors. Thirdly, it’s the performance of the business. Now, a founder will go, “Holy heck, that’s the wrong way around. Number one should be the performance of my business, and so that’s the first thing that founders need to realize that the board’s priorities are different to theirs in terms of the ranking, and what also that the implication there is, you are more likely to be fired, and founders can be fired, regardless of their amount of equity. If they’ve got a board, they can be fired, more likely to be fired, and they’ll be fired faster for lack of transparency than they’ll be fired for lack of performance. If there’s a lack of transparency, they’ll be fired on Monday. If there’s a business performance issue, they’ve probably got six, 912, 18 months. So that’s number one. You’ve got to understand the board’s priorities. Number two is build relationships with the board and understand each of the board’s hot buttons. Every board member has a hot button. Number three is that the board members, because a lot of them are VC firms, and I work a lot of VC firms. I’m actually on quite a few boards myself for those VC firms. A lot of board members don’t seem to have time to read the board papers, and that frustrates a lot of founders as well. All the all the board members forget what was in the board papers and discussions last time, and so founders need to be really good at summarizing what happened previously. And then the last point is, don’t give the board a 50 page deck. A lot of times the board meetings are one hour to two hours, keep them 10 pages, really concise, really clear, keep, keep the board on track. So those are just a few elements.

Jim Beach 25:49
All right, you mentioned disappointment, Dane. What is your plan for dealing with the disappointment this coming Friday when you lose to the United States at soccer at the World Cup?

Dane Bruce Hudson 26:00
Well, Jim, that’s a really good one, because as an Australian sport nut, I’m tragically used to it. Australia has some amazing athletes, really. We do. One of our challenges in team sports is it’s been a couple of decades since our teams have been able to string wins together, so I’m optimistic, but I’m also practical. It’s hard to string wins together. I talk about this in business as well, that great businesses are dynasties that they have – they may not win the premiership every year, but they’re in the mix every year, and same thing with sport, you need to consistently win day in day out, but I think we’ve got a really good chance, Jim, but I wish you and the best of luck.

Jim Beach 26:53
We will see what happens. I feel the same way about our team, they just don’t usually perform that well, very long, so Jane, how do we find out more about you? Get in touch, get a copy of the book, Discipline Beats Vision.

Dane Bruce Hudson 27:09
So the book is available on in a number of bookstores. They may not be in the bookstore close to a lot of the listeners, so one of the best ways, obviously, is Amazon, Goodreads, Booktopia. It’s on each of those, and available online as a hard copy or ebook. So that’s probably the best way to get the book. I’m getting lots of great feedback on it. I, it’s not about making money, that’s for sure. It’s about sharing my ideas, and I’m getting a lot of really good feedback on it. So I’d love people to buy, have a read, and enjoy it to get to know maybe me and what I do in terms of my mentor and practice. Go to my website, www dot impactful leadership, or one word, or lowercase.com and you can have a look at me and what I do, I, I loved my corporate career, but I much prefer helping out amazing founders.

Jim Beach 28:07
Fantastic, Dane. Thank you so much for being with us. Great information, and congratulations on the book. I hope it sells, and I can’t wait till Friday. But thanks a lot for being with us.

Dane Bruce Hudson 28:17
Great, thanks, Jim. Take care. I really enjoy the conversation,

Jim Beach 28:20
and we will be right back.

Intro 2 28:38
Well, that’s a wonderful question. Actually, give. oh my gosh, I love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim. Wow, that’s, that’s, that’s a great one. You know, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question, and, and I don’t have a great answer. That’s a great question. Oh, that is such a loaded question, and that’s actually a really good question. School for Startups Radio.

Jim Beach 29:00
We are back, and again, thank you so much for being with us today. We greatly appreciate it. Very excited to introduce another great guest who will help us grow our businesses better. Please welcome Clark Ingram to the show. He is the founder and president of People Profits, a place where they believe that workplace performance can rise to another level. He focuses on solving three costly challenges: employee turnover, chronically open positions, and workforce skills gaps. He has served as the head of HR in multiple different industries and has been very successful in bringing his common skills to that industry. He has been in four different industries as the chief HR officer. Very impressive. He’s able to bring 40% savings to staffing levels because of the systems he’s created, and we will find out about them in his new book called Child. Learn proven strategies to overcome failing conventional talent management. Clark Ingram, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

Clark Ingram 30:08
I’m doing great. I appreciate the invitation.

Jim Beach 30:12
So, where is the marketplace right now for jobs? How is it looking, and what do you think is going to happen between now and Christmas? Bad time or a good time to get a job?

Clark Ingram 30:23
It’s a fairly stable time. I’ve always kind of an eternal optimist. I believe that now that the Iranian thing may be stable, a lot more stable, and that’s going to kind of hopefully wind down. I think what you’re going to see, there’s going to be a lot of really interesting things happen in the business world.

Jim Beach 30:46
Okay, what are the biggest trends in HR? Is it still remote work versus go back to the office, or is there something else we’re talking about? More,

Clark Ingram 30:58
well, it kind of depends, because a lot of your, your typical HR people, they’re still talking about the same things they always talk about. On the, on the other hand, what I like to talk about is employee turnover. Most organizations that you talk to, they will tell you their employee turnover is out of control, and they don’t know how to, how to fix it, and then, secondly, is they can’t seem to find good people. You hear that just constantly.

Jim Beach 31:27
Yes, we do. Yes. All right. What is the cause of all of the turnover? Is it just that the younger generations are lazy? What

Clark Ingram 31:37
is it? Oh no, I don’t. I don’t really believe that at all. I mean, I’ve got grand, I’ve got kids and grandkids, and so I, I get a good, pretty good mirror on that.

Jim Beach 31:47
Mark, what do you think of the current generation? Are they as lazy as I say they are?

Clark Ingram 31:52
No, I don’t buy into that. I mean, I’ve got kids and grandkids, and they’re just, they’re not in that category. Okay, so you got you’ve got issues in each generation, but that’s not what’s really going on here. What’s really going on is, and this is the thing that I focus on, that’s a little bit different than typical HR people, and that is that what are the root causes of your employee turnover, and they are organizationally specific now. The 8020 rule applies. Okay, and there are certain issues that everybody has, but you have to focus on what’s going on in your organization. My understanding is that your podcast is to leaders in an organization, and what I want to challenge them to do is be brutally honest with themselves, be as objective as possible, see through the symptoms, and figure out what are the root causes of their turnover.

Jim Beach 32:53
Okay, what would those likely be? Is it the CEO is a jerk, or there’s not a clearly defined goal for the business? What are the reasons? Sorry, go ahead.

Clark Ingram 33:04
Okay, I’ll be honest with you, I have yet to be in an organization where they was, you did not have one of the executives that weren’t a jerk. I mean, it just seems that way, not necessarily the CEO. I’ve been in organizations where the CEO was, was it was unbelievable, unbelievably good. Okay, but he also had people working for him that were not, and the other thing is, you’ve got frontline managers, that’s a huge one, always. Generally, it’s because those frontline managers have been thrown in to a situation that they weren’t ready for, they need training, they need development, they need experience, etc. Those kinds of things. I almost never find compensation to be a root cause of the problem. It may be some things involving compensation, like one of mine, was that we literally just were not keeping up with the value we had. People going through development programs, their value was going through their roof, but the compensation wasn’t keeping up with it. Okay, and I can go down a long, long list. I mean, the list is pretty much endless. There are certain things you go on LinkedIn, you look at those things where they talk about here’s the causes of turnover. Yeah, those all exist, but there’s also a lot more, and it has more to do with your organizationally specific things and finding out what is really going on. Why are people really leaving?

Jim Beach 34:40
Okay, and how do I find that out? Do I have forced exit interviews that people hate doing, or how do I get that information?

Clark Ingram 34:49
I am a, I am a hardcore non-exit interview person. Okay, I, because I’ve given lots of exit interviews myself, and I tell them what they want to hear. Yeah, okay, so I don’t believe in that. What I do very strongly believe in is you need to have an informal communion communication network out there in your organization, and it doesn’t – it’s probably not best for the for that person out there to be the CEO. It’s generally somebody else, somebody that everybody talks to, and then what you need to have is go to those top two people in that department, because they know why that person really left. Okay, everybody generally almost everybody in the department will knows, but they won’t necessarily say why they actually left, but if you can build that network in each one of your departments of that finding that person who knows what’s going on and is willing to tell you that the real deal, and I’ve always been able to do that. Now it takes a little bit, and but here’s the other issue, you cannot ever out those people. Okay, you’ve got that information has to be on the down low between you and that person, but if you can get that built, then then you will find out exactly what’s going on.

Jim Beach 36:14
Clark, a story comes to mind. I had an office, which was two stories, and my office was upstairs, and then there was like a hallway that was open to the big pit area down below, and at that time I also was suffering from Gillian Beret, so I was having trouble walking, and I would.. I heard through the grapevine that one of my favorite employees had quit, and I was kind of shocked that he was gone, I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye or anything, and I ran into him at the mall four years later, and I asked him why he quit. I said we all loved you. He was like, Jim, you ran me away. I was like, what? Like, yeah, every time you came out of your office, you were staring straight down at me. I was like, no, I was staring at my feet, so I didn’t trip. I didn’t want to fall on you off the balcony, because I had Gillian Beret. I had trouble walking. I wasn’t looking at you, but he quit because I was looking at him.

Clark Ingram 37:14
Yeah, and there’s a ton of those type of stories out there. Okay, and the way that you have to deal with that is be able to have enough of a relationship with those people. I mean, why would that guy do that to me? That’s that’s a terrible reason to quit a company, because you think the CEO might not like you or something like that, okay, but unfortunately those are the kind of things that happen, that’s the reality of some people, they will, they will do those kinds of things, but and there’s a limited amount you can do about some of these issues, but some of these issues you can do a lot about.

Jim Beach 38:05
There are five reasons why employees work for us. You call it the magic question. I’d love to hear. Yes.

Clark Ingram 38:14
Okay, I’ll give you a good example. Recently, I was consulting with a hospital, and they were kind of a unique situation, and I got there, and I, that I, that’s the standard one of my standard questions I asked right off the bat. Why do you work here? And I wanted them to give me a written answer back. Okay, because now all of a sudden, especially if you talk to your core people, you know every company has a core people, most of your churn is happening on the short, the short term, okay, but you’ve got that core of people that are that are and they’re staying there, okay, go to them and just ask them very simply, what are the five reasons you personally are working here? So I got back, I don’t know, 40 or 50 answers, and there was one word that was on every single response, and that was the word community that that hospital had started off as a community hospital in a small town in New England, and they are now a regional, I mean, this is a very large organization now. Okay, and literally, you know, 1000 employees, and for that part of the world, that’s a huge employer, and so what ended up happening was that I ended up taking all of those answers that I crafted our employer brand, and it’s all about who are we as an employer. If you’re going to come work for us, here’s why we’re in business. We’re in the bed in our number one answer for that hospital was we’re in the. Business of taking care of our community. Now the question became, in their particular case, was what was community – was it this that small town right there, or the county, or that that region of the United States? Okay, and everybody actually defined it differently, and that’s not a problem, but the issue is you’re what you want to crack your marketing tool. Now you’re telling the candidates this is who we are. We are not somebody else, but this is what we’re trying to do, this is where we’re going, this is our mission, etc. etc. So now what ends up happening is the people who can buy into it will apply. The people who are going.. I don’t understand. I don’t get it. I’m not for it. And so they’re not going to apply. I could have worked for Exxon years ago, but I don’t.. I would not fit in at Exxon, and I know I wouldn’t. So I never applied there. And that’s really what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to get the people who can automatically buy into you to apply, and the people who are not going to buy into you to never even apply.

Jim Beach 41:09
Let’s move on to chronically open positions. How do we handle this issue?

Clark Ingram 41:16
That the other thing that people call that is hard to fill jobs, and almost always those jobs are the certified jobs, like you know, truck driver, okay, you got to have a CDL with five years of safe, safe driving, welders, plumbers, nurses, you know, every industry has those particular jobs, and it’s almost always a skill set where the the supply is way below the demand. Okay, you and we all know that in every industry right now, everybody listening to this, they know of those top five jobs in their industry that nobody can find. Okay, now here’s the real issue here. Those people are not necessarily just looking for money, and that’s the problem that I run into all the time. People think that they have to buy those people. There’s always going to be people who have more money than you, and you can’t just – you can’t give them to top dollars. What I have found nowadays with those people that fall into that category, they’re looking at 10 jobs at one time. Okay, now it’s a matter of what do they want. Okay, for instance, I had an opportunity recently where I got a job, a consulting job, and it was a part of the United States I’d never lived in before. I absolutely loved it. Okay, I made good money, but I also got to live in a part of the world that I had never lived in, and it was awesome. Okay, but that was my personal thing. One of the things you have to figure out is what do you have that nobody else has. What’s different about you, what can you offer? Not necessarily money, but something else.

Jim Beach 43:07
I had a friend named Chris Hanks, who always used the interview to try to find something about this person that they could use, not against them, but to use to get them to stay there, for example, you know. Oh, you’re really, you know, concerned about your son getting into college. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to give you $100 a month directly into your son’s saving plan for college. Exactly.

Jim Beach 43:37
Yeah. What do you think of that example? That’s going to tie them there forever, isn’t it?

Clark Ingram 43:43
That’s that’s the best way to engage your people, and everything is to get them to sincerely want to know them as a person. Okay, I’ll tell you my story. I had a lady one time in a company years ago that I could never remember her name. I just had a bright spot in my brain, but one thing I could always remember was that she had a grandson that played Junior League football, and I would – I would skip right over her name, and I would just ask her, ‘Well, how’s your grandson doing in football? And she would talk for 20 minutes. Okay, that’s how you engage people to sincerely get them to know that you, you care about them as a person, not just they’re not a robot. And that was part of my issue coming out of finance, going into HR, was finance people always look at people as robots, and they’re not robots, they’re people, and that’s the issue. That’s what actually kept me in HR, was dealing with the most complicated organism on the planet.

Jim Beach 44:49
Yep, people can be difficult. So, yes, trying to have these hard to find jobs. Is there any trick to find the people that you’ve discovered you. It’s actually, you have to go out and look for a certain category. Any suggestions there?

Clark Ingram 45:06
I tell you what, let me tell you a story. And hopefully, okay, so I was in Oklahoma a while back, and Walmart was really struggling trying to find truck drivers, and they couldn’t do it, and they were in the oil and gas industry in Oklahoma, as you can imagine, they just got a ton of truck drivers, right, and what they discovered was that if you talk to the oil, and talking to people is a key issue, this whole thing, right, but they talked to the oil and gas people, and they started asking them, okay, what do you not like about your job? And very quickly, this is the things they came back with. I don’t get to eat dinner with my, my family. I don’t get home in time to eat family, eat dinner with my family. I don’t, I’m sitting out at the well site, waiting for hours until they’re ready for my load. Okay, and just, can you just imagine you’re sitting out there, it’s probably August, it’s burning hot, and you’re just sitting there waiting right for hour after hour, and they came up with all these different things, and so Walmart went back to the distribution center and said, “Okay, how can we reset how we do things? This is the key. Well, how do we reset doing those things, so that we can get these truck drivers back home at night to have dinner with their families? And what ended up happening was they came up, they made some changes in the distribution center, so that we, they set them up where the truck driver was leaving the distribution center in the morning, he was hitting two stores and then coming back to the distribution center and dropping off his trailer, and he was getting home to eat dinner at home with his family that also cut out the whole sitting drop and waiting for their load to drop, right. And so what ended up happening when they came out and the money was roughly the same, okay, but the hours were completely different. They were able to eat dinner with their families, etc. and immediately it was stunning. It was absolutely stunning. How many oil and gas guys immediately went over to Walmart, and they gave up maybe a little bit of money, not a lot of money, but they gave up a little bit of money to be able to eat dinner with their families, and for them the answer to their problem,

Jim Beach 47:41
that’s a great example. I love that. What about the skills gap? How do we handle that, Clark?

Clark Ingram 47:50
What I found is two different things. You, the first step in stabilizing your workforce is by figuring out what are the root causes of your turnover, and either eliminating or minimizing the root cause. Okay, that’s the very first step. The moment that happens, and you start cutting your turnover, and your trend starts falling. For instance, in an organization recently, about four months in, we saw a drop in the rate of turnover in four months, okay, and it kept dropping from there, went down by 50% at the end of two years, okay. We cut their turnover in half in two years. The second thing is you immediately make your recruiting easier because you’re not having as much turnover as you were, so now all of a sudden you’re recruiting less, and you’ve also now figured out your employer brand. You’re telling everybody what’s what, who you are, and everything. Next thing you know, you start getting better and more resumes in from the people that are really applicable, and all of a sudden that’s how you eliminate that, that whole issue. Okay, because now all of a sudden you’re staffed up, and you’re not losing people. Now all of a sudden you’ve gone from being in the 70s and 80% staffed up, now you’re at not, you’re in the mid 90s, and all of a sudden that whole issue just goes away.

Jim Beach 49:22
Yeah. that’s a good, good example. I love that. Is remote work gone? Is that what’s going to end up the long-term structure of remote work?

Clark Ingram 49:37
Well, right now, for instance, I’m remote right now, I’m sitting in Dallas Fort Worth area in an apartment, and I’ve got a one-bedroom apartment with a study, and my study is my office. Okay, so I’m now fully remote. I also, I’ve got a pretty unique situation because of my, my previous jobs and all that kind of thing, I’ve got. Son, who is fully remote, but he’s also got a pretty unique situation with the company. He works for a very large organization, but at the same time he’s also learning that it’s not, it’s not fully remote. I think that there is some situations out there, but they’re generally pretty unique. I think that a lot of people, what one of the things I tell people, especially the younger people, every single one of my opportunities in my career to make a major jump in the organization would not have happened if I had been remote. It was because of the relationships and the different things that happened while I was at work, where I’m building a relationship with the executives and all that kind of thing. If you don’t mind, let me throw in how I ended up in HR, because I was in the finance department of a publicly held company, and my, I’ve done a couple of things for my CEO to make him happy. He then trusted me, and I believe part of that was because we were looking at each other eye to eye, and all of a sudden I’m the VP of HR, and that opportunity came because I was working in the office. So remote work actually can hurt you in some cases.

Jim Beach 51:25
I think it’s always bad for your career if you’re really into your career. I don’t think you should ever do remote.

Clark Ingram 51:31
Yeah, I’m just.. I know there’s a lot of people that that’s really what they want, but I’ll tell you this. The other thing, and this is the main, main issue I hear from a lot of CEOs and COOs is the fact that they want to show me how we’re going to measure your productivity, and are you being productive, are you truly being, and if you can show me that you’re a disciplined person and you’re going to get all of your stuff done, even when you’re working at home. That’s one thing, but we’ve also had a lot. Unfortunately, I have numerous or lots of examples where it just doesn’t work because the person is not disciplined enough to get their job done and be at home.

Jim Beach 52:21
Yeah, I just don’t buy it. I think that they’re doing their laundry half the time. That’s what I think. Congratulations on the book, Clark. Absolutely fascinating, and it looks like it’s going to do a significant job in the industry of helping people, so great job. How do we find out more? Follow you online, all that stuff, please.

Clark Ingram 52:47
I have a website, People profits.com I’m also, you can get to me at Clark ingram.com They end up in the same place. What I’m doing nowadays is I’m not consulting anymore. What I am doing is I’m trying to educate people, I’m trying to convince HR that what my process, my process works and gets the results that they really want, and that turnover has to be the very first stop. I’m doing a lot of speaking now. If you will look up Amazon and churn ch you are in by Clark Ingram. You will find my book there, but you will also find it basically anywhere where books are sold online.

Jim Beach 53:32
Fantastic, Clark. Thank you so very much. I hope you have a wonderful Western rest of your summer. Thanks for being with us.

Clark Ingram 53:38
Okay. Thank you for inviting me,

Jim Beach 53:42
but we are out of time, but very appreciative that you were with us today. Tell your friends we will be back tomorrow. Be safe, take care. Go make a million dollars by now