Culture that Converts: How Thaddeus Tondu Builds a Team that Powers Marketing Results
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What's up, Lemon Heads? Welcome to another episode of From the Yellow Chair. I am overly excited today because y'all know I love talking about company culture. I love talking about marketing, and so when I can talk to a marketer that's going to talk about company culture, I'm here for that conversation every day, all day, and listen. Anybody listening to this podcast, whether you are a contractor now, want to be a contractor on another type of business. What we are talking about today is impactful for any type of business, no matter what you do or how you do it. We're going to talk about how you really should be focusing on culture to do great things, and how hard it is sometimes to focus on culture when you try to scale a business. So settle in, grab a seat. You know, I always say those of you that are driving, you know, buckle up, cruise control, let's roll, talking about company culture and marketing, let's sip some lemonade, all right? So welcome, thaddeus.
Speaker 2:1:07
Thank you for having me on.
Speaker 1:1:09
Absolutely. It's great to see you. We did have to reschedule this a few times because I think you and I need a solid hour to be able to talk, I think the first time you were sick, the second time I was sick.
Speaker 2:1:22
So here we are, cold and flu season.
Speaker 1:1:30
We made it work and we're together Well, and I know that you've done some great things. So you're the co-founder of on purpose media still still driving that train forward. So tell us a little bit about yourself and why my listeners should really care about what you have to say today no, thank you, um, for that.
Speaker 2:1:42
Culture is one of those things like, okay, someone's gonna talk about culture. Uh, that's a digital marketing person. Well, no, like I have 15 employees. Like I have 15 team members that work for me, and so it's. We're not a small business by any stretch of the imagination. But the other thing is that I've worked for some really great organizations in my time and I've worked with some really poor organizations in my time, and I found that there's correlations between the great organizations and the poor organizations and it really comes back to culture. And so much so that I made it a point of practice inside of our business to be able to make sure that we focus on culture and culture first.
Speaker 2:2:18
Like, I've worked for a company it was a small business, I think there was like 10 of us in there and you know, like those goals, when people set like a company-wide goal and you're like, okay, we should probably try to hit it, well, the team members were telling me one day they're like, I'm like, so what about this goal? Like when was the last time you guys hit it? And they're like, we never have. I'm like, so how do you guys care about it? It's nobody really cared about the culture because it really wasn't tied into what they really wanted. And so I'm like, okay, good to know.
Speaker 2:2:45
And then I also worked for another company in the passenger elevator industry and I've been a long proponent of something called people product price. And you have to go in that order of people product price. If you put those in the wrong order, if you go price product people, you actually don't care about your people right, care about your price. And I remember the conversation very vividly um, I was talking about doing something, uh. So, like you know, when you have you ever dropped a set of keys down an elevator shaft before crystal?
Speaker 1:3:14
um, not down an elevator shaft, but I get where you're going.
Speaker 2:3:19
They're like right and so, like, if you drop your keys or you drop a phone, uh, down the bottom of an elevator shaft, you can't go in and get them yourself. You have to call the elevator company and they're going to charge you $300 to come out give or take, depending on the company. And so my idea was hey, if we're going to be there anyways, why don't we take that money and actually donate it to a charity and say, hey, we know you, that sucks, you dropped your keys. Tell you what, instead of paying us, we're going to point up that money we're going to donate to a charity. And the boss goes what do you think the shareholders would think about that idea? I'm like okay, so here we are trying to do something nice for people and you just want to go to the bottom line on the shareholders. Does it make any sense?
Speaker 1:4:00
Well, you know my co-partner here at Living Seed, emily. One day we were talking I was like man, I'm so frustrated because I wish I knew how to make clients happy. And people happy Like our clients, of course, are like who helps us pay the bills and all of that. And then we have this team. And then I remember thinking like are we team forward? Are we team? Are we our team forward? Are we client forward? And how do we get those as balanced as possible? And you know, that can be a challenge.
Speaker 1:4:29
And so you're right, though, like I watch, you know, tiktok right now is full of what I call angry employees just blasting their companies, and sometimes, when you listen to it from the mouth of a team member, that doesn't really see the full picture for their company. And they're blasting things. Man, you're like there's a lot of angry people out there right now with businesses that are not people centric, and so I love this idea. And so I love this idea. Well, so I think this. Sometimes you answered a lot of this but like why sometimes we get out of our head about some of these things that we think when you think company culture, everybody starts thinking money and people, people, more money. Why do you think it's so crucial, critical even for?
Speaker 1:5:17
marketing agency owners so even people like you and I that own similar style agencies. Why do you think that culture really resonates so well? And then how do you think a contractor could apply that same thought?
Speaker 2:5:30
No, great question. So the the I was actually reading this yesterday. I'm reading Jay Shetty's book Think Like a Monk, and he talked and they've actually done a study. Uh, just literally happened to be reading this last night.
Speaker 2:5:41
And so where they, where they look, they say, okay, well, where does happiness change? Where does money impact happiness? Well, they actually found anything above $75,000 per year Doesn't increase happiness. So you could have Jeff Bezos level happiness If you're earning $75,000 per year. Now, some people are, some people aren't, but that's where that, that threshold becomes. Above that, there's no correlation anymore to money breeds happiness, and so that's.
Speaker 2:6:08
This thing is like okay, well, how do you make people happy at work? Well, people are going to pay them more. But what if they just don't want more money? Right, especially, you think about the generations. Now, like I'm technically a millennial, even though I'm not really like the term millennial for me there's a term for like those gen xers it was a gen y's that are like they're not millennials, but they're not gen xers, and so like that's me. But you look at the generation after that, the I think gen z, and they don't care as much about Some of the millennials also don't care about as much about pay. They care about work-life balance, they care about having freedom, they care about having time to be able to do what they need to do, and this transcends all types of businesses.
Speaker 2:6:46
No matter what type of business you're in, people want to be A feel validated, and so you mentioned that part about, like this, client, people, happiness. Who do you focus on the client here? Do you focus on your people first? That service businesses, by the way, have the exact same thing. They've got customers right. I mean, I like. I like the term client versus customer, because client seems longterm customers like one off transaction. I like my wording right.
Speaker 2:7:11
Whether you have clients, you have clients, you have customers. How do you make sure that they're taken care of? Well, you just take care of your people first. And if your people are happy, guess what they do for your customers and your clients? Well, they're happy too. And so the other part, and it's not also like, well, I'm going to put in a gym and we're going to do yoga and we're going to have puppies in the office. Okay, cool, I work at a remote organization, organization, my dog's always home, uh, but like we, we're fully remote, uh, but we have a really strong culture and the. The thing is that people also don't care about that stuff as much yeah um, here's what they care about.
Speaker 2:7:47
They care about being part of something that is bigger than themselves. Right, when you can get somebody bought into a bigger vision and in like, when's the last time that, crystal, that you've done this with your team? When was the last time that you've shared your one, three and five year vision with your team?
Speaker 1:8:05
You know. So, ironically, we're going, we are self-implementing EOS at the moment. I literally just did that. And you know one thing that I think Lemonsie does well to reiterate this is you know one thing that I think Limit Seed does well to reiterate this is you know we have I mean, I can show it on here if you're watching us so we have this awesome little tri-fold that has all of our core values, our mission, our vision, strategy, branding, marketing, all that we do.
Speaker 1:8:30
But we just actually redid a five-year plan, a three-year plan, literally just a couple of days ago. I mean, we haven't shared it with our team yet, but we do. To your point, we are sharing with our team goals, why our goals are important, how each member of the team can help hit those goals. And that's actually the call that I have right after this podcast interview is we meet with our marketing coordinators to tell them how can they specifically help us hit our goals and how can we help hit the client's goals, because, honestly, when our clients are happy, our teams are happy too. So it's such a synergistic approach to things. But you're right, we need to share more of our long-term goals with our team and just be a little bit more transparent, especially since we just re-upped them.
Speaker 2:9:16
Yeah, and you mentioned, like the core values and the mission and the vision. Well, you know what honesty, integrity, probably aren't on your core values, right, and I actually encourage any single person that is listening or watching this if you have honesty or integrity as one of your core values, that core value sucks like straight up. Think of a different way to phrase it. Hey, our first core values do what's right now, what's easy, which is honesty and integrity, right, and transparency, like it's all blended into that one core value. Because if you do what's right now, what's easy, well, now you're living an honest, transparent, truthful, integrity filled life and so like thinking longer term of like okay, well, that's good. Now how can your team live your core values? How can your team take those core values and live them at home? Right, that's what we looked at. And now we also repeat our core values. We hire against them, we fire against them, we do all those things. But when you look at the longer term vision, I mean you run a business too, like I've built it off of revenue and I've also forecasted my net profit and what I want my net profit to be. But here's the thing is, my team doesn't care how much money I make, they don't care about net profit. No, they don't care about top end revenue, but here's what they care about.
Speaker 2:10:27
When I've ran the math and we've done it backwards to say, okay, we can impact, when we hit our goal, in five years, over 4,000 individual households and people go what? How does that work? Well, okay. Well, if we take our average client, if we have a hundred clients and I might I might mess my math up here, um, but if we have a hundred clients, uh, and each client, let's say, has 10 people that work for them, okay, well, now there's a thousand. You times that by the average people in a household 2.3. It's a weird number, right? So you times it by 2.3, the average people in a household, and now you've got close to 3000 people that you've impacted, plus our team members. Right, and so when we tell like, directly or indirectly, because if our marketing sucks and that business can't grow and they decline, they got to lay people off, but if they grow, they can hire more people, they can impact more families, they can impact more lives you know, and part of something like that.
Speaker 1:11:25
Yeah, people. So our core values. I'll tell you really quick. So we use an acronym so that we can remember it better, but of course we use the acronym Zesty, so zealous for creativity. We are E experts in strategy. We are S servant minded advocates. We are T thorough and timely and we are Y yielding results.
Speaker 1:11:45
And so we go over this all the time because our team you know what will really set my team off it is not even necessarily a correction from me or correction from leadership is when one of their clients are not happy. So our team is so passionate about pleasing and helping our clients grow and not like in a cheesy way, just they're young, a lot of them are younger, and so they just get so much value from seeing their worth with clients, and so we really build into that. We celebrate when clients say positive things about our team. We celebrate internally as much as we celebrate wins externally. And so you're right, you know it is. It is true. You see these like funny tag. You know titles now, like oh, she is the heart of the company implementer, she is the director of fun, and those may be a little corny to a lot of people, but honestly, if you want to care about retention of both your team and your clients. Someone intentionally focusing on your team, I think can be a game changer.
Speaker 2:12:46
Do you have a cultured steward, like a culture steward, in your office, right, like somebody that is because generally it's top down right In smaller organizations like your size, my size, it's top down. It's us who are the ones who are trying to impact that culture. But eventually it becomes you remove yourself from. You might even remove yourself from the hiring part of things. And now you're hiring team members without you involved. Same thing with the service company. When you grow to the point, now you're hiring people without you involved, how do you make sure that they understand the culture? Well, if you've painted that good enough picture and you've got them bought in with that culture steward, that one person that can really drive that culture, especially in the interview process, that's where it starts to. I mean, it starts to be in in the um, the hiring process, like in some of the ads and such um that you put out there and talking about the culture, the core values, and it transcends that and it comes into the onboarding. But when they have that culture steward, now they can, they can really take that messaging that you've created, that desire, the want of an amazing organization and putting it forward.
Speaker 2:13:44
You know, I think of Amazon. Amazon when they first started, didn't have a lot of money. So what did Jeff Bezos do? Well, he went across the Home Depot. He got two doors, four pieces of wood in a couple of brackets and he built desks from doors from Home Depot because desks were too expensive. You know what they still use at Amazon. Those Desks were too expensive. You know what they still use at Amazon, those, those.
Speaker 2:14:08
They still built them because it was this idea of if I can save money at a corporate level, I can then pass those savings down to my clients at the lower level. Now, love or hate Amazon, the idea behind that is still there and they still leverage a lot of those same philosophies inside of it.
Speaker 1:14:28
But that's culture, right, that is culture and it's intentional and it's's built and it also can shift really quickly. But I know, like one of the things that you know on purpose media does as a commitment is doing what's right over what's easy. You know, like, how do you think you know, or even when things are hard, so how do you think it's we should be? You know, working with our team.
