Episode 22: Why Workplace Culture Matters and How it Changes Your Business for the Better with Corby Felsher

Episode 22: Why Workplace Culture Matters and How it Changes Your Business for the Better with Corby Felsher

Corby Felsher:
I really didn't know how to approach Humans that worked for me. And I think I was a little harsh or maybe a little bit, I dunno, gruff. And when things didn't go right, I would get mad. And over time I realized that that surely is not helping anything at all. It's just making me not sleep at night and making everybody upset. So over time I focused on not just paying more money, but focus on why are people leaving? Why don't they want to stay in work.

Announcer:
Grow your cleaning business, make more money, have more time. This is the Profit Cleaners podcast with your host Brandon Condrey and Brandon Schoen.

Brandon Schoen:
All right, welcome everyone to the Profit Cleaners podcast. We are joined by a very special guest. We've had him on a podcast once before, maybe twice before he is our mentor and our coach and the guy that really inspired him to have all of these systems and things that actually make this whole thing work. And I just want to welcome Corby back today, formerly Stapleton Home Services and now it's Central Park Services you can fill us in on that and updates on that Corby. Today, we're going to talk about the importance of employee culture, how you can make your business better with that said let's go ahead and dive in. So welcome Corby.

Corby Felsher:
Thanks for having me another great introduction. If you guys could do this every morning for me, when I wake up and you introduce me and I can start my day, that'd be awesome.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah, totally. That's exactly what we'll do. We'll set up an Alexa recorded alarm for you, like welcome Corby it's just like the best dude. We know he's going to conquer all of us today. Go Corby!

Corby Felsher:
I see that's another business idea. You guys are killing it.

Brandon Schoen:
We also were just wondering, have you been coming for, because we, some of them are recent reviews on the podcast are just like, get Corby back on the episode. He is so much value in so much knowledge. And so I know we've learned so much from you Corby and I know a lot of people can learn from you how to grow their cleaning businesses. So, but yeah. How are you doing the culture thing? And let's dive into that.

Brandon Condrey:
So look at Corby real quick how we got this started. I used to be a customer of Corby's and I sent him an email that said Albuquerque Home Services and then we pitched them on teaching us how to do this. And so you were into it. And the way that we got started was you come up to Denver, we'll have this sort of like introduction and see if you still want to move forward with it. And so Brandon and I show up there, think we spent five days with you. I think it was a week. And we learned what we could out of that week. It was great. But one of the things that was really striking was that everybody was there on time. They were super psyched to be there in the morning. There was coffee and music and laughing, you know, as everyone was getting ready to head out for the day. And we were like, this is definitely what we're hoping to go for it. But the thing that really blew me away was on the last day, you handed out a hundred dollars cash to every single person in the room and told them it came from us. And so we got lots of high fives on the way out the door. One of them would give the name of her cousin, who we ended up hiring like a year later. And so that was a transformative couple of days, especially the cash distribution at the end. So what we're looking for is how do you teach people to maintain that? And how do you keep that culture going after such a long time?

Corby Felsher:
Yeah, well, there's a lot that goes into that. I think it just kind of happened naturally over time and 20 years ago when we got started, it wasn't that way. You know, we didn't read any books. I didn't have a mentor. I wish I did. I wish you guys were around. And I was able to jump in with you guys because it was a struggle to keep employees. Our turnover was so high when we started, we really didn't know what we were doing with that. We knew how to clean houses, we're building some good systems, but we couldn't keep people. And we just kept increasing pay. And that didn't work. Then we were just paying people a lot more and the same thing was happening and, and the cultures seem to be sometimes toxic. And I think a lot of that was my naivete and not used to running a business. I really didn't know how to approach humans that worked for me. And I think I was a little harsh or maybe a little bit, I don't know, gruff. And when things didn't go right, I would get mad. And over time I realized that that surely is not helping anything at all. It's just making me not sleep at night and making everybody upset. So over time I focused on not just paying more money, but focused on why are people leaving? Why don't they want to stay in work? And it was happiness, the happiness. And if you drew a little graph here, this is my little happiness graph. You know, so Lindsay and Louisa, the two directors of my company, Lindsay came out when we 10 years ago, but I always talked about the happiness equation. And it's just a couple of lines that point up with a smiley face. There's some really deep metrics in there, but I know no one can see it, but there's a little graph that they smiley face at the top. We have one life I've said this before. I brought it down to the grassroots of, we all are here on earth. We have one life to flow through. They spend eight hours of their day working for me. Instead of being grumpy and pissed off all the time, I turned that to being like I'm freaking honored that somebody would even think about coming through the door to clean houses for my company. I mean, just that change in perspective of, I never thought of it that way. I really didn't. And over time that kind of just took cold and that kind of changed the whole culture of our company as to, if there's a human not happy, then we're not successful. If there's a customer not happy or more importantly to us, any of our employees unhappy, then that doesn't work. Then we are unsuccessful, no matter how much money we're making, it is not a success. So working on that with Lindsay and then Louisa, we just figured out what can we do to promote happiness? It's an interesting formula and a lot goes into it. And as simple as making the room in the morning with where our employees meet warmer and more inviting place to be. So we got rid of the kind of cold feeling in there, inserted couches, really nice carpet. And every day that places scoured top to bottom for a couple hours. So when everybody arrives, it is perfect. It's got the right smells and sounds and feelings, and there's a very easy change. Right away it started changing my attitude, my feeling about my own business and, and slowly that helped a bit, but still we had some turnover issues. I'm talking 15 years ago, 10 years ago. And we started to focus a little bit more on bonusing and giving our employees a chance to be a part of our success. Kind of an alignment if you will. If we're making money, they need to make money. It has to be the same equation.

Corby Felsher:
So part of our bonus program, we now have a very good alignment with that. So we're all working hard towards the same goal. And with that, we don't have very many unhappy employees anymore. There's a lot more inside of there, but a lot of it was those simple changes and, and my attitude switches to being just grateful. I mean, honestly grateful that somebody would wish to come be a part of what we're doing. And I try to, I don't go there every day right now, but when I do go there, I think everybody all the time. And so does Lindsay and Lewis, that's a giant, thank you. The words mean a lot and little reward programs where we are publicly announcing little successes for teams, making sure the others hear it. We make little announcements saying team three, thank you again for doing what you did yesterday. $50 bonus for each of you. This is uncalled for. You did it anyways. And thank you so much. Thank you for what you do well, who you are. And that sort of, it feels good to say it right now, even, but it makes the supervisor or the director feel good too. They get this power to make somebody happy and to, you know, there's nothing better like you guys just did to me, when we started this podcast, you said those wonderful words about me while I'm swelling up with pride. And honestly, there's no way you can't. You didn't hand me any money. Right? I appreciate that. And you should keep that coming, but this report doesn't replace that, but the power of giving a human, the ability and a system to be able to make someone happy is pretty good. And that just kind of takes care of itself. As far as I don't need to tell Lousia to give kudos to a team, you know, publicly that feels good from the person, giving it to the person receiving it and the others around. See, well, I, I would like to do more of those things. I would like to be acknowledged. And those are just a couple of little things inside there, but most of them are fairly logical things that we've picked up over time is just being human, just existing. What makes us all happy? What does it for us? And we search inside of that all the time. And honestly, if there is something that went wrong and there's an unhappy employee, it really changes our focus and it derails us and the business aspect of it. And it sends us in a different direction. So we do as many things to began to continuing promoting happiness.

Brandon Condrey:
Great stuff Corby. You said a lot in there. So we have adopted most of those things as we try to do, like the public kudos is a big one. So whenever anyone sends back some feedback that was very positive. We always post that publicly within the chat system so that everyone knows that these guys did this. And we bought us the most things from time to time as well. But there were definitely some things that you do that we still haven't been able to implement that I would like to work for. And one of them that blows me away is in the summer, you book out that food truck and you have a park kind of close nearby to where all the houses are getting service and the teams are all welcome to stop by on Friday, I'm like pick up a free lunch. It's on the company and we're servicing a much wider geographic area than you are. So we haven't figured out a way to do it in a central location. But we do like that. You're just always thinking of this like comradery. Like I remember seeing pictures of one of your Christmas parties that had a mariachi band at it and things like that. So what do we do all hands meetings we're bringing in Jonas or pastries or some kind of snack we've toyed around with a bunch of different foods. So you definitely touched on all the big things, making people happy. It's an inviting workplace, all that good stuff, but you definitely have some fringe benefits in there. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Corby Felsher:
Yeah. A couple of things that we do, we've always done is if anybody wants any continuing education classes, a lot of our teams like to take higher English classes and to learn how to write, you know, a lot of our teams haven't graduated high school and any effort we can do to help them get their GED or Spanish classes, English classes we'll pay for them. Right now, we have an English class and the English one, two and three, that's taught here in Aurora at the community college. And we pay for anybody that wants to take those classes we pay for.

Brandon Schoen:
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Corby Felsher:
That was a big one. We took that on 15 years ago. And not all the folks want to go back into school and to learn, but some do even those that don't take it. They know it's offered and it's there for them if they want it. And I think the gesture of offering it, it means something. We have a safety meeting tomorrow morning. Louisa now does all the safety meetings. We have a safety meeting every two months. I think it's every two months. And in that safety meeting, all the employees come in the morning. We do have a nice food arrangement. Always. We have a catered and now it's a bit of separation. Now we're having it outside, which is kind of stinks, starting to cold here. But in those meetings, we talk about, you know, slips, trips and falls and making sure that our teams are safe, but we always have an element of health, health, and happiness, right? So we try to talk about, you know, for example, if you're drinking soda, please try to stop and help them get on a program to stop drinking Coca-Cola. Let's drink water, teach your children that too. You don't want your children to become fat Americans, fat, grumpy Americans, right? You don't want that. I don't want that. I talked about my friends all the time hand, their kids soda like, what are you doing? Come on. So we try no fast food. Don't go to 7/11 for lunch. And we try to shape. And every meeting, we talk about health and happiness, a bit to kind of help them in their personal lives too. As to these are hard working people that work for us, they don't have a lot of time to maybe prepare a proper lunch, right? But we're giving alternatives and ideas as to, and when we have food serve, it is healthy, great food. Everybody gets a water bottle. We have good water stations in our office. We constantly have our people have our folks make sure you're drinking water, make sure you're drinking water, drink enough water. We mentioned it all the time. We're not just sending them off into the world to bust their butts all day long on Coke. And you know, McDonald's. And I think that alone, the health factor and some of our teams take it so far, they want to do exactly what Lindsay and Louisa do. Linds and Louisa two strongest healthiest humans on earth. They want to be just like them. And they set the tone, Lindsay and Louisa workout five days a week. They chart everything they eat. And they talk about that with all of our teams, what they're doing, how do you look so good? What do you do? How are you so happy? And we give that personal knowledge back to them also, and try to educate them as to how to be healthy and happy. Sometimes it's not, people don't know that some people don't know you're not supposed to eat McDonald's four days a week. They just do. And some of our employees do that. Our focus is to teach them a better way to exist and eat and be happy.

Brandon Schoen:
I just wanted to touch on something Corby cause one of the talking about food, one of the times I was up there training with your teams, actually kind of behind the scenes. I noticed there was a potluck going on at the company. And there was like, every team made a meal. And throughout the lunch day, like the lunch period of the day, like everybody came in and there was all this comradery and everybody was talking or on WhatsApp talking and talking to each other and just sharing that comradery. Right. And breaking bread together and being a team together, eating together, I thought was really cool that you've integrated that if it's not a food truck, it's a company potluck for lunch and everyone's contributing or something else. Like I know you do and have like a loan program for your employees. I think you've talked about that. I mean, but you just go the extra mile to really make it an amazing place for them to work.

Corby Felsher:
Yeah. The potluck, I love that so much. Everybody loves that in the mornings to have, you know, a couple that teams prepare food and some things that I never get a chance to eat. Some of the foods that are our teams cook you just can't get, and those mornings are so great. And we had to stop those because of COVID. And that's, that's one portion of that that is really disruptive right now is we don't allow our teams that morning, that morning touch. And that's very difficult right now for our teams, because one of the reasons they love the job is because they have all these great friends and we really have a separation there right now. So we're trying to do that via our WhatsApp a little bit more like you guys have been pretty good with is to this group messages. And they communicate our teams communicate with each other all the time. We try to promote that. And it's difficult to do as you know, virtual does not replace reality and the real life and you can't replace a morning potluck the way that we had them set up for, with WhatsApp, for sure. And I think everybody just like everything else. I think our employees are hanging on for that moment to come back to. And, but we're trying to replace it with is even more kudos. WhatsApp, kudos, more touch in the morning from at least Lindsay and Louisa. When the teams roll through, they don't get to see each other as much, but we try to, you know, make sure that we're there for them and communicate and have a little bit of a family time in the morning with at least us and the teams as they roll through. We only allow one team in at a time. I think you guys have a similar role right now is to not allow all the teams come in. So it's heartbreaking to see it actually to have, you know, each team lined up outside in their cars, waiting for the next team to come out and I hate it. I hate it so much. And I'm, I'm looking forward. COVID being over for just that factor just that did not see them lined up outside, waiting to come into the building to go to work and kill them.

Brandon Schoen:
So Corby, what'd you say that you've experienced less turnover, happier employees, maybe they're even doing better work in the houses cleaning because of all this culture that you've been building?

Corby Felsher:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think absolutely the culture that we have at central park cleaning is excellent. It has been great for at least 10 years and finding new employees. We almost always gain employees from within it's. We rarely post anything online or advertise anymore. We always give the opportunity to our own employees to have a neighbor or a friend that they want to bring in. We start with that. I think you guys do the same thing and we reward our employees for that also is if we'd rather hire from within than to advertise for a job. And that's been the focus for a long time, but yes, the productivity goes through the roof, happiness and productivity. I mean, there they are. I mean, if you have a happy employee, I'm pointing at a graph that no one can see me, but if you have a happy employee, happy supervisors, happy owner and happy customers. And it all kind of goes, it's all aligned. And our employees know if they do good work in the house, those customers are happy and they fill out a report and it comes back to us in our survey or an email or a Yelp. And it comes back very quickly and they're very quickly rewarded from that financially also that alignment has changed everything. It's a little bit of a, the bonus program has helped a bunch with that kind of connecting them directly to the kudos from our customers. So it's not just us, you know, saying, Hey, you guys are doing a great job. If those words are ever said, we make sure that that is told to the team that actually did the cleaning. It's not me and Lindsay and Louisa doing a great job. It's those three awesome young ladies. And we make sure that they're rewarded for that. It's never held in an email. It's always given out back to the teams via WhatsApp or posted actually on their workstation, whatever that email is that next morning I'll be right there for everybody to read.

Brandon Schoen:
Awesome, man. You know a thing I can remember just being up at your place, like just that energy that you create, like you're mentioning, Corby like the environment like you put in nicer couches and carpet. The first thing when they would walk in and there's music playing in the morning, it just lifts everyone's mood and spirit. It's this safe haven they can come to and be real with each other and kind of escape, maybe some other parts of their life that they can really just trust being in the space. And, but I think what we're getting at is as a local business, as opposed to a franchise, you have a lot more control over that culture, how you interact with each other, what you do and how you build that culture. And it's just, you've been an amazing inspiration to us. I think that's one of the biggest, I mean, there's so many things we've learned from you, but really that one we're still trying to hone in, but it's already made such a big difference in our business. And I think that's what we kind of want to share. This message with everyone is just how much control you can have over that culture and the great upside and the benefits of that investment in your teams and your, and your people.

Corby Felsher:
Yeah, that's for sure. And I think our listeners, your listeners probably know this, but the students are slowly becoming the masters here in this situation, you guys, with your growth and what you've done and your willingness to learn and to take on whatever, not just what central park cleaning has given you guys, but the way you grasp what's around you and the knowledge that you soak it all up. And I think it won't be long until I'll be the one calling into you to, it's not long because unbelievable. You change the culture. Speaking of culture, people at Albuquerque, we've never been used to a clean like this and a system like this, right? So, and that's why you're now probably number one in that market. I would guess if not very close to it and congratulations to both you guys. I mean, seriously, I talk about all the time I told him I was talking to my mom about it the other day. She really doesn't know much about my business, specifically, this portion of it. And I was telling her about it. She was like, what? There's two guys where? in there doing what they got. I explained to them about an hour. And when I was done, I felt so great about this situation. Like what a great setup we have and what an honor to work with you two guys. And I'm honest, I told Lindsay and Louisa, the other day, these guys will become, they will surpass us in sales. They will surpass us in knowledge. And I'm glad I'm just happy to be a part of the guys. Thank you.

Brandon Condrey:
There you go and running. We started off with, Corby doing the we're giving Corby the boost of kudos at the end, and we're going to end the call with, Corby tell on us then we're the future. So Corby is just build a culture even on this podcast. And now I'm super excited to go do some stuff.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely, man, thank you so much Corby! We're so honored to be working with you, man. This has been an amazing journey and I know everyone, the listeners too are getting a lot of value out of this. We have, like I said, people reaching out all the time and being like, we want more from Corby and this is awesome. And like, we didn't even know we were going to inspire so many people. So that's really cool. So I think, yeah, I mean just the more knowledge we can all learn together and continue creating value in the world with our businesses the more, the better. So thanks for joining us today Corby.

Corby Felsher:
Thank you guys.

Announcer:
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