-: The people, we're a people business.
Yeah, most businesses are people businesses
at the end of the day,
no matter what product or service you're offering
to your customers.
What I like about it is both my customers
I get to work with,
I've got a lot of friends who I've built over the years,
23 years in a particular market.
You get to know people.
Customers become friends, that sort of thing.
And the folks I get to do it with every day,
you know, my fellow associates.
I have the ability or the fortune of being the president,
but I think of myself as on their team
and I get a chance to work with some really great people
that I've just built friendships with over the years,
and I like to say it's not work
when you don't think of it that way.
I don't think of it as work, it's just what I do,
and I enjoy it and do it pretty well.
The biggest challenge, I think,
is getting people aligned and headed in the same direction.
When you've got a boat that's got 480 people in it,
you know the most important thing
is making sure everybody's sort of rowing
in the right direction,
and that as an executive leader is really hard to do
because they don't just do it because you say so.
It doesn't work that way.
My children don't do it 'cause I say so, either,
so I don't know why I would have ever thought
that would work at my job.
But you got to get people to buy in.
You got to set a vision,
you got to get people to get behind that
and understand it and be vulnerable enough to ask questions
to allow that kind of interactions so
that people build trust.
And then once that trust is built then you can start
to arrange things in the right direction.
It's a lot slower than you want it to be
'cause you wanna just say do A, B, and C
and expect everybody to fall in line
but it just doesn't work that way,
even if you have all the authority in the organization.
It's just, you're not gonna get very far
if you don't bring people along and get buy in.