Is Anybody Listening to Me?

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Loren Feldman:
Welcome Shawn, Paul, Jennifer. It’s great to have you here. I want to start today with a topic that Jennifer raised in our emails before taping the show today, which is how business owners communicate with their employees. I think this topic is especially relevant to both Jennifer and Shawn because they’ve both gone fully remote since COVID hit. But Jennifer, what prompted you to raise the issue?

Jennifer Kerhin:
Well, communication from a CEO is supposed to be both visionary but then establishing a connection. And with remote employees, and ones who maybe you’ve hired a year ago and you still haven’t met in person, the visionary part has made sense to me. I’ve worked through how to align our mission and our vision and our values to showcase to employees. But how do I establish a connection? Or is that possible? And do I have to just wait until we go face-to-face? Because we do events. I meet the employees, often in person, sometime throughout the year. How [is it] best to communicate, to establish connection? I’m just trying to figure it out.

Loren Feldman:
You’ve spoken here before about the fact that you guys do get together, even though you’re working remotely. You have these events, and people gather there. So you do get to spend time, and you have meals together, and all that. But you just mentioned you have an employee you hired a year ago who you’ve never met in person. That’s kind of an amazing situation.

Jennifer Kerhin:
I was at a show site at a convention, and there were three staff members, and I went out to dinner [with them]. Two of them, I had not met. They were hired in the fall of last year. So I had not met them personally. Obviously, I hired them through Zoom. It all worked out. They’re doing a great job. But having dinner with someone, there’s a connection there that you just… I mean, I’m in the business of face-to-face events. I don’t know why this surprises me. But this just doesn’t come across in Zoom, right?

I can, and I do, often talk about the culture and the values of the company. But that connection, I’m trying to figure out how to manage that through Zoom. We do “Lunch and Learns” where the company buys lunch, and we do training. Once a month, we do a virtual happy hour where one of the departments plays a game. We all bring drinks, and we learn either trivia or learn about ourselves. I’m just looking for more of those ideas of communication, but more so connection with employees.

Paul Downs:
My question is, why would you expect a fully-remote relationship to work at all? When I think about organizations where the actual leadership is sort of up on the mountain somewhere and giving pronouncements, often that is by video or whatever, but you’re not in actual touch with them. Most organizations that have been around for a while that do that always have somebody in person who’s actually dealing with the line-level people.

You know, think of the military or any large corporation. There are layers. And you’re trying to run a company where there aren’t any layers but you. And you’re not making a physical connection, but you’re trying to be both the scary leader or the removed leader, but also the empathetic, inspiring leader. And I’m not sure that that’s possible without just showing up and being in the same room with people.

Loren Feldman:
Shawn, what do you think?

Shawn Busse:
I don’t have a silver bullet, but I have a couple of ideas and also some things I’ve seen with some clients that have worked well. So one is, I would encourage Jennifer: You might consider the phone over Zoom. It’s interesting. When you get rid of the element of video, you just have a different relationship. And that might be something worth trying with some of your employees. There have been some studies on this, that when we see ourselves, we’re so fixated on how we look and how we appear that it kind of freezes our brain in other areas.

I also think, especially for fully-remote companies, that they need to take that money that they were going to spend on office space, if they’re committed to fully remote, and they need to spend it on flying people to be together. And I think they need to do that probably two to four times a year.

The clients that I’ve had that are pretty successful in terms of culture and being remote—I mean, talking all over the country—they’ll gather in different places around the country four times a year. And these are not related to client work, like you’re doing. These are just purely to shape and cultivate the culture. Those have been really, really successful, from what I’ve seen. I’m trying to do that with us, too.

Jennifer Kerhin:
Shawn, that’s good to hear. We are starting that. It’s taking a big hit in my budget from professional development, but we’re doing department meetings with each department coming together for a day and a half in person. The first one’s coming up, and we’re going to try that. Each department over the next four months is doing a day and a half meeting in person. That’s a good-to-hear recommendation, because we’re going to see how this works.

Paul Downs:
Yeah, for what it’s worth, my son managed a team of software engineers that was scattered all over the world. He had like 20 people in—I can’t remember—a dozen countries. And they made a point of getting together physically three or four times a year, just exactly like Shawn said. And I think that that’s pretty well-accepted in the software world where distributed workforces have been around for a while. You just have to get together. There’s no substitute for it.

Loren Feldman:
Paul, obviously, you’re not taking your factory remote anytime soon. Do you have any employees who are working remotely?

Paul Downs:
Not exclusively. Yeah, I would say that, “No,” is the answer. There are some who spend a day or two working from home when that’s the right solution to the day. But for the most part, I see all my people at least several times a week, physically. Like, we’re just in the same room. And I think that that makes it much, much easier to be the kind of leader I want to be. I think I would have a hard time projecting empathy over video or the phone.

Loren Feldman:
So leaving the remote issue aside, Paul, I know you’ve given a lot of thought to how you communicate with your employees. Do you have an overall philosophy of what you’re trying to accomplish in the way you communicate with them?

Paul Downs:
Yeah, my goal is for people to feel like they’re part of an organization that values their participation. One of the things that I learned in my Vistage group—I think, five or six years ago—we had a great speaker, and the guy was an actor. He was one of these local theater types, and he came in. He said, “Hey, if you want to be the leader, it’s a role. It’s something you put on every day.” You change your demeanor, the speed at which you speak, the consideration you give people. Everything is an act, because all your people are going to be looking at you. They’re the audience, and they’re looking for, I believe, certain things from leadership.

And those things are: One, leadership has a plan, that there’s some considered way that we’re going to move into the future. Number two, leadership is honest about the situation the company is in. And I give regular briefings every Monday updating my employees as to the financial health of the company, and the sales we made, and sort of what I see on the horizon.

But I think that the other thing is that it’s also important that a leader, these days, demonstrates a personal connection to the people who work for them, and shows some empathy and knows when the dog needs to be put down, or the kids are sick, or whatever is happening. You have some recognition that your people have their lives and that you’re there. You’re listening. You can be a resource.

I just had an employee who got on a plane to go to Ethiopia last week, because his family has been there. He’s from there. And the family was caught in the civil war situation, and he had not been able to communicate with them for three years. And during this time, there was a lot of trouble in the area he was in, and he didn’t know whether they were alive or dead. And just recently, he was able to reestablish communications, and he said, “Hey, I want to go back.” I was like, “Sure. Do you need some money?” But I just loaned him some money so that he could go and do what he needed to do.

And it’s being ready to respond to how people are. I think it goes a long way to building a culture, the kind of culture that I want, where everybody cares for each other. But it has to come from the top, too. The leadership has to care about the other people. So I think those are my goals.

Shawn Busse:
I love all that stuff you’re saying, especially the acting part, because I think there is something to projecting when you’re in a position of leadership. And I found that in times when I’m just not motivated, and I’m not fired up, the results I get are just so poor. And when I am engaged, and when I am participating, it’s exponentially better. Man, that’s really, really cool.

Loren Feldman:
The acting thing is kind of interesting to me. You need to perform, but you need to perform and act genuine. That almost seems contradictory.

Paul Downs:
You need to perform. But there are techniques involved in performance that make your inner feelings communicate better to the people who you want to understand what you’re thinking. A lot of that is about diction, honestly. It’s about making sure you speak slowly, clearly. You don’t contradict yourself two minutes later. You listen.

But all those things are, to my mind, a skill-set. And when I encountered this guy, I’d already been a boss for more than 25 years. But thinking back to all the situations when I was much younger—particularly, when I was younger and I was trying to communicate to people who were older and more experienced than me—it would have been damn helpful to have some of these techniques in hand, just to give myself a little bit of a tailwind when you’re fighting to establish your own authority and expertise in certain subjects.

Shawn Busse:
I’m right in the middle of promoting somebody internally to the role of president. And it’s just part of my succession plan. And it’s so interesting watching her present to the team. She’s really beloved by the company, everybody there. She does the third thing you talked about, which is create personal connection, Paul.

But it’s interesting, because the thing she’s actually not that good at—and she’s working on it—is clarity and succinct communication. And so when she does a presentation, she’s got way too many slides and way too many bullets. I’m really trying to coach her on a single message, very clear. Metaphors make it simple for people to understand, because they can only handle so much information at once. And in the one-on-ones, you can get a little deeper, but in a group, that clarity of information and succinctness is just so important. And I think that’s part of the skill-set and acting you’re talking about, too.

Loren Feldman:
And is that translating in a remote environment, Shawn?

Shawn Busse:
It’s not as easy. You know, it’s a lot, lot harder, because you can’t read the room. It’s really easy to be passive, if you’re a participant. Those little things that when you’re in a meeting that help the meeting, like somebody throws out a little joke here and there to lighten the room, those are harder to do. Knowing the vibe of the room is really difficult on Zoom. So yeah, I think it’s an uphill battle, all the way.

Jennifer Kerhin:
I would agree with that, Shawn. So I, every Monday morning, send out a weekly email from the CEO. Just sort of an update of things. I sort of have different categories I focus on, and there’s usually a call-out of an employee who did something great. But then on Wednesday morning, we have a half hour, full-staff meeting. And I asked them, I was like, “What do you think of these emails? Do you even read them? And what do you think of the Zoom meeting?” And they told me some really great positive feedback. And they’re like, “Don’t you know this?” I said, “How do I know it?”

It’s impossible to read the room, Shawn. Right? It’s impossible. You’re trying to be succinct. I’m not very clear sometimes either, so I try to do repetitive words, repetitive categories each week, just so that the message stays on point. And they remember it. It was great getting that feedback, because I wasn’t sure how it was being received.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah. I mean, Paul, you’re so fortunate, in some ways, that for your business, it’s not an option. It’s just clear that you lose so much over the remote. And you’re starting to see some of the studies. There was a study out in Bloomberg about productivity and remote work and some of the problems with those early studies that were showing greater levels of productivity.

So that’s just one element, the productivity side. But I think the morale of the team and the sense of connection, those things are, boy… We’re humans. I mean, we’ve been together in real space for hundreds of thousands of years.

Jennifer Kerhin:
But I’ll never go back, Shawn. Will you?

Shawn Busse:
We’re looking at office right now.

Jennifer Kerhin:
Okay, I’ll never do it. [Laughter]

Loren Feldman:
Why never, Jennifer?

Jennifer Kerhin:
With what we do, the ability to find labor across the country makes it so much easier to scale up. It’s really hard in the geographic region I’m in to find the labor needed. It’s difficult. And so now, I’m not constrained by geography. I am constrained by other issues, but not that.

Shawn Busse:
Where are you at?

Jennifer Kerhin:
In Baltimore.

Shawn Busse:
Oh, is it just that it’s really expensive labor?

Jennifer Kerhin:
It’s very niche, very niche labor.

Shawn Busse:
I mean, that’s a huge market. That’s interesting.

Paul Downs:
Well, I think that what we’re gonna end up with is replicating what used to be back in prehistoric days, where people lived in very small family bands. And most of the time, they were in groups of just a couple of people. And then they would get together with the rest of the tribe several times a year to sort of make the culture work, and get their kids married, and do whatever they did. But it was a splitting apart and coming together, splitting apart, coming together.

And we’ve just done this big experiment of what happens when everybody splits apart. And we haven’t figured out what the coming together needs to look like. Although I think that certain industries are ahead of it, like my son’s software experience. But that wasn’t cheap. They would put everybody on a plane and fly them to Portugal or whatever.

Loren Feldman:
It helps to be in the software business.

Paul Downs:
Yeah, the VCs could do that. I don’t know whether Jennifer could afford to do that. But I think there’s no free lunch, in terms of, “Oh, I don’t need to rent an office, and I can just sit at my desk all day and run a multinational corporation.” I don’t think that that’s actually going to work. We’re gonna see that pretty clearly.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, I agree. One hundred percent.

Loren Feldman:
Jennifer, it sounds like you’re doing well with a lot of these things. Did this issue come up in your mind because there were problems that you feel need to be addressed? Or is it more just as a vague sense that you’re not sure you have the connection you’d like to have, or that you once had when you were all working in the same place?

Jennifer Kerhin:
It’s more just a vague sense of: Am I talking, and no one’s listening? [Laughter] And should I be doing something differently? I think that it. To Shawn’s point of reading the room, if you talk, and no one’s paying attention, you find out pretty easily what you’re saying is worthless. When you’re sending an email or doing a Zoom call, it’s more difficult.

And I absolutely believe, to Paul’s point earlier, the way I inspire is to tell my employees: What they do matters. The important work that they do, they may not notice it, but it helps fund the mission of an association. And we work with some amazing associations that are doing really important, impactful work out there. And what my staff does is help them fund that mission, and I want to make sure that comes across. I want to inspire them. But I also want to know that they’re listening or that it matters and that they’re not just ignoring it. I don’t know. I think it’s a more vague sense, Loren.

Shawn Busse:
Did you used to have an office, Jennifer?

Jennifer Kerhin:
We did, we did.

Shawn Busse:
What was the lease payment on that office and the headcount of people you had there?

Jennifer Kerhin:
Well, I owned the office. I still do, and so I never really paid myself. I should have.

Shawn Busse:
Ah, so artificially.

Jennifer Kerhin:
Artificially, right. And then, I would have been the person—in 2019, my staff came to me and wanted to work one time per month at home. And I was like, “No. No, I don’t see it.” And then COVID forces us—and I was two weeks away from buying a 3,500-square-foot building to house our office in right before COVID—to fully embrace the virtual work.

And I love it now. I absolutely adore it. I think my employees love it. It works really well for all of us. Are there challenges? Yes, we discussed it before: training new people—recent college graduates—is challenging. Connection is challenging. And I think, I’m hoping, Shawn, that these meetings, these in-person meetings, do solve some of that. I wish I would have thought of that last year.

Shawn Busse:
I mean, I think folks are kind of just now figuring this out. And they saw the positive aspects of remote, which are many, especially when you have kids, or elderly parents—

Loren Feldman:
Or commutes.

Shawn Busse:
I don’t miss the commute at all. And now, I think we’re starting to see the downside. I love your idea of getting people together. Companies that I’ve seen, that are doing that, seem to be doing well.

To get back to why I asked Jennifer what you were paying for your lease, I was doing the math on pre-pandemic Kinesis, and we were spending—I don’t know—nine grand a month, somewhere in that range, for a team of 14-ish people. It was probably more space than we needed, but it was a wonderful space. If I take that number, multiply it times 12, throw in some extra money for all the lunches and other stuff we would do, it’s probably $120,000 a year. That’s what, like $8,000-$9,000 per person? I could budget that to fly them places, put them up, have them have great experiences.

So I don’t know that it’s necessarily more expensive to do that. It’s just a different use of the money. And I think a lot of folks went remote, and they were like, “This is sweet. We’re saving all this money.” But they’re missing out on the costs that they’re paying, that they’re going to pay in higher turnover rates of junior employees, folks feeling disconnected, alienated. So they’ve got to counteract that, and that’s gonna take money. It’s gonna take money. That’s all. It’s as simple as that.

Loren Feldman:
All right, next topic. Jennifer, at the end of the last session that you were on, you mentioned that you’ve recently invested heavily in a new website. Could you tell us a little about that? What are you trying to do? And how’s it going?

Jennifer Kerhin:
Sure. It’s not launched yet. It will be launched in a few weeks. So we’re on the final lap. I think we rebranded January of 2022, and we did it very quickly after COVID. Because our company changed dramatically. We added a lot of new services. We’re doing a lot of tech support in the virtual event world. So we rebranded, but there just wasn’t enough time in the day to rebrand and then make a great website. So we just sort of slapped it together. And now, a year into this, a year and a half, it’s not good enough. A year into it, we realize we’re just not making an impression when new associations come to us. It looks bad.

And so our new website, we’re not going in a new direction like Paul is with his website. It’s the same people who we want to see it, and it’s not for lead generation. It’s more to showcase who we are to associations that already may be interested in us. And I need a higher level of prestige—so, better copy, better photographs, an all-around more sophisticated look. What we had was mom and pop. You know, Wix. And now moving to the next level, we’ll have a professional designer, professional copywriter, a brand agency helping us to get to that next level of sophistication. So I would say, overall, pretty great. I look forward to the end result.

Paul Downs:
You’re near the finish line on this?

Jennifer Kerhin:
I am. I would say two more weeks.

Paul Downs:
And what’s the budget been?

Jennifer Kerhin:
It’s been low. We’ve spent about $15,000.

Paul Downs:
On everything?

Jennifer Kerhin:
On everything.

Paul Downs:
That’s low. Low by my lights.

Jennifer Kerhin:
Hopefully the sophistication level is still high. We have a great, great agency that we’ve worked with in the past and partnered with on some other things that I know gave me a family and friends discount. And I’m looking forward to seeing the end result.

Paul Downs:
Do you get a lot of organic traffic to your site?

Jennifer Kerhin:
No.

Paul Downs:
How do people get there then? Why would they find you?

Jennifer Kerhin:
Yeah, they contact us through other means. I speak at a lot of conferences, or they moved from association to association. And so they say, “Oh, I recommend this company,” and then that person goes on the website to hear more about us.

Shawn Busse:
The function it’s performing is affirmation. So your customers, or your potential customers, are evaluating you. They’re finding out about you via word of mouth. And then the website’s job is to affirm that purchase and to not scare them away.

Jennifer Kerhin:
I’m going to use that sophisticated marketing language, Shawn. I like that. [Laughter] Affirming our abilities and our reputation. I like it. I think that’s going in my next weekly CEO email.

Shawn Busse:
That’s cool. I really, really encourage folks to think about good marketing as a series of yeses. Like: Okay, they heard about us via word of mouth. They heard good things. That’s a “Yes.” They went to the website. They saw on the website what they heard via word of mouth. That’s another “Yes.” They read a case study. That’s another “Yes.” They picked up the phone. They had a great experience on the phone. That’s a “Yes.” And so just evaluating that entire journey of purchasing to the point they become a customer and then after, and make that all yeses and look for the nos. And it sounds like your website was kind of a, “Well, maybe.” It wasn’t a, “Yes.” So that’s cool.

Paul Downs:
Yeah, I’m looking at your website right now. The thing that’s missing, that you need, is testimonials from clients front and center. Because anybody can put up a site that says, “Hey, we do stuff.” But it’s the power of other people affirming that you did a great job that you really want to put right there.

Jennifer Kerhin:
Totally agree. That’s phase two. So the website goes up. And in the meantime, we have people working on writing case studies with our clients. So that will be probably in the fall. Totally agree with you.

Paul Downs:
I would extract the pithiest sentence or two from those case studies and just make a scroll on the bottom of the screen that’s just like, “These people are awesome, bup, bup, bup.” We’ve looked into why people buy from us, and a big part of it is they’re suspicious. Like, “Who are these guys who just came from a Google search?”

So we’re always making sure that we’re showing them two kinds of testimonials. One is from people who are just plain impressive, but the other one is from people who might be down the street from our clients—so that we’re saying, “Yeah, we could service anybody, even the most demanding, but we also work with people like you.” And doing those two things at the same time is the best thing you can do with testimonials.

Some kinds of testimonials can chase people away. If they look at the testimonial, and they say, “Oh, well, of course, the president hired you. Of course, you did a great job. But that’s not me.” So you have to figure out who your next client is and make sure that you’re demonstrating that you could do for them the same work you could do for anybody else.

Shawn Busse:
I agree with most of everything Paul just said. I’m curious about what your strategy is for your “About” page. My instinct, when I look at a company, is to go to the “About” page and the “Team” page.

Loren Feldman:
Jennifer, you don’t have one, right? At the moment.

Jennifer Kerhin:
So what happened is—it’s terrible. I have under-performed in the marketing area but over-performed in the sales area.

Shawn Busse:
Right.

Jennifer Kerhin:
And so now I’m going back to be like, “Okay, our marketing presence needs to reflect who we are as a company now.” And so that’s why, a couple months ago, I embarked on this process. Yeah, don’t look at our website. It’s terrible. [Laughter] For the new website, feel free to give me feedback in a few weeks. I’ll come back on and you guys can give me better feedback on that.

But overall, across the board, we tell a much better story in the sales process than we’ve ever done in marketing. And I don’t know where that disconnect happened. It happened years ago. It’s, I think, because I enjoy sales more than I enjoy the marketing part of it. I don’t know.

Shawn Busse:
Well, who’s helping you with the marketing?

Jennifer Kerhin:
Well, up until a year ago, I was totally responsible for business development. So business development marketing was on my shoulders, and I lean toward sales.

Shawn Busse:
And you like sales. I mean, that’s like the age-old pitfall that every owner does, is they hire a VP of business development and hope they’ll do marketing and sales equally well. And they never do. They’re either really good at sales, or they’re really good at marketing. So it’s great you’re recognizing that you’re really good at sales. And that’s usually the fastest path to growth, which you’ve demonstrated. So who’s going to help you with the marketing now?

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