Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: 1-800-Flowers Founder and CEO Jim McCann
I recently interviewed 1-800-Flowers Founder and CEO Jim McCann on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:
Adam: Our guest today changed the way millions of people around the world order flowers. Jim McCann is the founder and CEO of 1-800-Flowers and is the author of the new book, Loadstar, tapping into the 10 timeless pillars of success. Jim, thank you for joining us.
Jim: Adam, it's a pleasure to be with you.
Adam: Pleasure is mine. You grew up in Ozone Park, Queens.
Jim: Well, South Ozone Park to be specific, you know, Ozone Park was aspirational for us.
Adam: You grew up in South Ozone Park, Queens, a 15-minute drive from where my dad grew up in Middle Village.
Jim: Middle Village is a nice neighborhood.
Adam: It's a very different neighborhood now than it was back in the day, back when my dad grew up there, my grandmother actually grew up in Middle Village.
Jim: It's a nice neighborhood. It used to have a very Germanic population there probably 60, 50, 60 years ago. Without German immigration, that's Wayne, but there are still a few terrific German restaurants in that neighborhood that people come back from Long Island or Brooklyn or other boroughs to go to because there are several really famous German restaurants there.
Adam: It's interesting you say that because I know it as an Italian neighborhood.
Jim: Well, Italian-German-Jewish combination, but it's stands out there. Gephardt's, Lieberstein’s, Zum Standtisch, and three great German restaurants are all on the same road there, Myrtle Avenue, which gives the community its character.
Adam: You're taking listeners back to your early days growing up in Queens. You went to John Jay College of Criminal Justice and you kicked off your career as a social worker and worked as a bartender on the side. Can you take listeners back to those days, those early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?
Jim: Well, I think, Adam, they've all played a role in shaping who I am and the lessons I've learned and continue to learn. I grew up, as you say, in South Roselle Park, which is very much a blue-collar neighborhood. Most heavily ethnic would-be Italians and Irish, Jews, and then a mix of everyone else, all blue-collar folks. There were a few people who would put a suit on and go into the city, meaning Manhattan, and they'd take the elevated train into the subway into the city. But I couldn't figure out what the heck they did.
So, my role models growing up, at least the ones that were legitimate, and there were a lot of illegitimate characters in my neighborhood. Those of you who've seen one of the greatest movies of all time, Goodfellas, that was the neighborhood that I grew up in. Those scenes, that bar, those restaurants, all were my neighborhood, literally around the corner from where I lived. And several of the characters in the movie lived on my block. So, it was a hardscrabble neighborhood, but our role models were civil servants, policemen, firemen, the bad guys, and shopkeepers.
My dad was a painting contractor. He had a small painting contracting business with his brothers. And so, to keep me off the streets, my father's philosophy was old enough to walk, old enough to work. I remember we painted schools, funeral homes, and churches. Those were our specialties in Queens and Brooklyn. It was a summer morning, and I was going out to get the men caught. And I walked past a young man, not too different than me in age, and he had a beautiful pair of slacks on, a nice shirt, and he was doing a little sweeping up outside the men's and boys' clothing store where he worked in. And this was 10 o'clock in the morning, and they were just starting.
And I said I've been working for four hours. I'm a dirty, stinking mess. And this guy is groomed and clean, and I want to do that. So, the next year, I had a job near my home in Richmond Hill. working at a men's and boys' clothing store. So, retail had a big impact on me. Working for my dad, and learning those things had a big impact on me. And then as you mentioned, I was a bartender because as an Irish Catholic kid from South Queens, you had a genetic requirement to be a bartender.
And I always did that to supplement whatever other jobs I was doing. And it was fun. And I was working on the Upper East Side. I had already started working in social services. I was running a home for teenage boys. which was wonderful and fulfilling. I lived in a group home for the first couple of years. I was a living counselor. Then I wound up running that group home, and then all the group homes, and then I was promoted to be the administrator of this home. We had about 200 boys, and about 500 staff, all of whom lived with the boys. And I loved it, and it was great, and it was formative for me. But I married young Adam. We started a family very young.
And working in a not-for-profit social work world, you don't make money. So, I was supplementing my income, working Friday and Saturday nights, and flipping bottles in a bar. One of my customers, who would stay late on a Saturday night and chat while we were closing up, told me he owned a flower shop across the street, and he was going to be selling it. And I said, geez, how much are you asking for that, Nick? And he said $10,000. I thought 1976, it was a sign from God, Adam, because I had just sold the building I bought and fixed up at Brooklyn, renovated. And lo and behold, I had a $10,000 profit in that transaction. So, I wound up buying that flower shop and kept my full-time job at home. and decided not only to become a florist but to try and build a business. And that's how my path from John Jay thinking I was going to be a New York City policeman, wind up working in social work along the way, loved it, deferred my police career, and then got sidetracked into retail.
Adam: I love it. What an example of the fact that there is no linear path to success. It's not like you wake up in the morning and map out your course and the course that you map out is exactly how life is going to be.
Jim: Look at your course, Adam. You're sure you're going to be a Wall Street maca, as they say, where I come from. And you have this job at one of the most prestigious hedge funds in the world. I think when you were there, it was the largest hedge fund in the world at DE Shaw, working there with predecessors like a guy named Jeff Bezos, and went on to achieve some kind of business success. And then you worked at Credit Suisse, and then you made a change and went into the entertainment industry. How did that happen?
Adam: It's a long story. Do you want me to go into it?
Jim: Yeah, I'd love it. I mean, you come from LA, so you had that entertainment, sports entertainment juice in you, right?
Adam: Growing up, I always wanted to work in sports. That was my dream. I always loved sports. Jim, we can talk all day about sports. Very sadly, you are a lifelong Mets fan. You're a part owner of the mess, which is actually pretty cool. Sadly, for me, I'm a hardcore Angels fan, so we can commiserate over that.
Jim: It's too easy to be a Dodgers fan.
Adam: At least we both have a mutual hate for the Dodgers. We can bond over that. I've interviewed some great Dodgers. I had Sean Green on the podcast and we were chatting off the air about the irony of the fact that I live in LA and love the Angels and he lives in Orange County and is a Dodger legend.
Jim: That's like living in the Bronx and being a Mets fan.
Adam: How do people do that?
Jim: Great peril.
Adam: At least in LA, our lives aren't in danger. I feel like people here are a little bit less violent when it comes to passion for sports. But in my case, a lot of it came down to understanding that the decisions that I made early on in my career were decisions that were driven by motivation, by what am I supposed to do? What are you supposed to do in life? What are the expectations set for you? You're supposed to go to the best schools. You're supposed to get the best grades. You're supposed to get the most prestigious jobs. I checked all those boxes. I did everything that you're supposed to do.
And at a certain age, in my case, I was 28, but at a certain age, you turn around and you say, what is life all about? Is it about checking all the boxes? Is it about climbing a ladder or is it about something more? And that took me on this journey that ultimately led to where I am today.
Jim: You had a great undergraduate education, Phi Beta Kappa, USC, then UCLA Business School. Then you wind up at D. Shore Credit Suisse. You've done those things. But is it that point where you say, OK, I've checked the boxes, but I'm still curious. I had this youthful passion and your antenna was up. You were looking for an opening. You were receptive to opportunities.
Adam: I think that a part of me was always receptive to opportunities, but I think that receptiveness was impaired by the desire to do what was expected of me, to do what people who always do the right thing do. And at a certain age, after a certain set of life experiences, you come to realize that What is the point of living life that way? It's your life. You only have one life. It's yours. Live it the way that you want to live it. What is life all about? What is the meaning of life? It's certainly not about checking boxes. It's certainly not about trying to please other people.
What I've come to realize, it's something that I talk to audiences a lot about, but What I believe in very strongly is that when you're trying to figure out what you want to do, you want to try to check three boxes. You want to do something that you love, you want to do something that you're great at, and you want to do something that allows you to make a positive impact in the lives of others.
And it took me a long time to figure that out. And early on in my career, I was in jobs that didn't allow me to check those three boxes. I didn't have this framework of understanding that this is the way you're supposed to approach your career. I developed this framework much later on. I started businesses that didn't attain anywhere near the level of success of 1-800-Flowers or any of the other companies that you own. And a big reason why is because I wasn't checking those three boxes. I wasn't running businesses that were aligned with what I was great at.
Jim: I didn't have the passion for it and Maybe I was making some kind of positive impact but not nearly at the level of what I'm able to do today The fact that you've done so many of these podcasts means you're curious to be you're willing to take chances and you're open to Changing your mind and making a midfield correction
Adam: I love the last thing you said, midfield correction. We make mistakes all the time. We fail all the time. We do things every day that we probably shouldn't be doing, and we have two choices. double down on the behavior that we shouldn't be doing or should we course correct and we're talking a little bit about sports the most successful athletes and the most successful teams are those that are constantly course correcting using the example of baseball the best baseball players constantly tweaking their swings how many opening day lineups are the same lineups world series Probably zero.
Jim: Yeah.
Adam: Although neither of us has a whole lot of experience watching teams in the World Series.
Jim: Well, yeah, I do, but I have to have a long memory.
Adam: 2002 for the Angels, but the Mets are at least a little bit closer.
Jim: So tell me, what's it like to have the generation's greatest baseball player get excited about the season again, and the poor guy goes down again with an injury, season-ending injury?
Adam: I'm trying to think of a more exotic word for disappointment, but there really isn't one.
Jim: And it's a shame because being an East Coaster, a National League Mets fan, we don't get to see a lot of him when he is healthy and playing. We don't get to see as much of him, but we sure do read a lot about how outstanding he is. And apparently a really good person.
Adam: A tremendous role model, what baseball is really all about, and hoping for a bounce back here next year.
Jim: I had a terrible thing happen at the beginning of this school year. I have seven grandkids, and the second of those is a boy 12 years old, and he's a terrific young man. His name is Liam. And he came to me at the end of the summer and had to sit down with me at him to say Grandpa, I have to tell you, I'm not going to be playing baseball this year. I said, what? He said, Popper, I'm playing lacrosse. I'm playing basketball on two travel teams. And there's just no room for baseball. And so I kidded him. I said, OK, you've broken my heart. You're out of the will to do what you want.
Adam: Jim, I love it. I have five nieces and nephews and I've been brainwashing each of them to become baseball fans, to become Angel fans. My niece, the day she was born in the hospital, I put on the Angel game. They were playing the Marlins. Every time I see her, do you remember that game? Angels, Marlins? I remember. I remember. So someone's got to do it.
Jim: Absolutely. But I can tell just by talking to you, getting to know you, and hearing your story. One of the things in writing Lodestar with my buddy, Dr. George Everly, was quite a terrific learning experience for me, we did a lot of work on the difference between optimist and pessimist. You're clearly an optimist. As we did the work, I was getting more and more concerned about people I know who I know are pessimists and how negative it was for them until working with Dr. George and doing all the research we've done over the last two and a half years to write Lodestar was that you are what you are today, but it doesn't mean it's what you are tomorrow. We have the ability to change ourselves, not just like you're doing and done in your career taking changes, but change who we are and how we think.
And when that realization a year, year and a half ago, just the light bulb went off on the work we were doing together, it really made the optimist in me more optimistic because about bringing the message to people that George has taught me that there's this thing called neuroplasticity, which means that the brain is always learning. Everything we do, all of those things that you were doing were experiences your brain had and your brain gets better at whatever it does.
So, whatever you do the most of, your brain gets better at. The good news is, that we can train ourselves to be optimistic or more optimistic or actually become an optimist. But the caution we should have, and we do have, is that it's 10 times easier for the brain to adapt to negative behavior. So if you're an anxious person, your brain gets good at being anxious. If you're a worrier, your brain gets better and better the more you worry. The inverse of that is true, but it's on a magnified proportionality.
That is, the more we train ourselves to think optimistically, to make an inventory of the things we want to do, to take our boyhood dream of being involved in sports and at 28 years old say, it's not too late for me. I have 100 years ahead of me here. I'm going to change my career path and I got some explaining to do at home. But I got all this education, and I'm on this great career path. I'm going to take a career risk. I can afford to. I have confidence in myself. Being you had enough optimism, self-confidence, and risk-taking acceptance to say, I'm going to try that career path, even though it's crowded and it's lidded with people who have not been a success. So, I applaud you for that. And it's listening to you brings me back to the work we've been doing over the last two and a half years to say, aha, here's more living proof. that we can change who we are and we can get better every day.
Adam: Jim, I appreciate it and I love it and it leads me to a really important question which is how as a leader do you lead and manage and work with and influence people who are by nature pessimistic?
Jim: Well, let's look at pessimists. Pessimists are less successful and less happy. They have measurably less positive health circumstances themselves, measurably less healthy. They have fewer friends and they have fewer successes. It's demonstrable. Optimists, on the other hand, tend to be physically healthier, mentally healthier, and happy. They tend to have more friends and better relationships because they're nicer and more fun to be around. And they're not Debbie Downers. So, I mean, that's kind of stark and clear. But I'll take you back to when I worked at St. John's Home for Boys, and I lived in a group home in a very tough neighborhood, working with 10 kids who came from the most troubled backgrounds.
They came to us in lieu, oftentimes, of going to jail, or because they came from such fractured family environments. Many of them had recently been on the street. So, 10 boys, call it 15 to 20 years old, 21 years old. And there are 10 of us living in this house, a nice house in a very tough neighborhood across the street from legendary projects. And I learned so much from those kids in that first year. I was horrible at them at work, but I learned. I had good mentors and I watched them. The mistake I was making, I'd come to work in the evening, come in, and work from four to 12. The day staff would go off around six.
And so, from six to 12, it was just me and the guys. And they'd have one bedroom, one to a bedroom, two to a bedroom. It was a mix. And my job was to get them to bed. I had my room there. I'd go to sleep, wake up in the morning, get them up, and out to school. And then the day staff would come on and I'd be done. I'd be off during the day. And I'd come to work and I didn't have a plan, and I'd be reacting to what was going on. And the police got involved here, I'd go deal with that. There's a fight breaks out here, I'd deal with that. This guy had some mischief over here, this guy. You reacted. And it wasn't until I saw the people around me who worked in other group homes or back at our main agency in Rockaway Beach, guys and women who were successful. The difference between them and me was we both cared a lot, but they came to work with a plan. They knew what they wanted to achieve.
And you have so much more potential or opportunity to impact things positively, to get them to go your way when you're setting the agenda when you're planning. Guys, we have a couple of projects tonight. As part of this week-long project, we've got to finish building the new pantry on the basement level here to store our supplies in. You two guys are working with me on that. We had a plan that we're going to clean the upstairs and we're going to plan a barbecue on Saturday, who's going to make a list of what we're going to need. So now, if you're setting the agenda, you have the opportunity. It's the same thing at work today, Adam. You asked about the difference between working with optimists and pessimists. Try and craft an environment where you're setting goals, you're keeping score along the way, you're setting up interim rewards, even if they're fun things like joke rewards, but you're keeping score. No one likes to play tennis unless you finally keep score. Maybe you warm up, but you want to keep score.
So, you've got to keep score. If we're having how many days of perfect attendance we had at school, and you keep a big billboard about that in the kitchen, People know what you expect and what you want. People want to know what the rules are. And those lessons came hard to me. At 21, I realized I had become my father. I'm saying all the things that I thought I'd never say that he said to me, I'm saying to my guys. But it's organizing people, try and create a group environment, crafting a culture, and influencing the atmosphere. You can't control a culture, but you can influence it. What things do you celebrate? What things do you reward? What things do you punish? What do you have tolerance for? What don't you have tolerance for? If people come in late all the time and you say nothing about it, you're saying that's okay. What are the rules? What are the parameters? What are the goals? What are the rewards? What do we celebrate so we can influence the environment? And the pessimists get caught up in that and sometimes they change.
Adam: And Jim, as you're sharing the lessons that you learned from your time leading in the group home way back in the day, Leadership is leadership. It doesn't matter where you're leading.
Jim: But it can be learned.
Adam: Absolutely. It doesn't matter where you're leading. You could be leading in a group home. You could be leading a small business. You could be leading a big business. You could be leading on the battlefield, on the baseball field. Leadership is leadership.
Jim: I have the same job today that I had 50 years ago running a home for boys. But now the people I get to craft in teams are friendly, intelligent, come from great circumstances, and best schools, but our goals are the same, to help them to achieve things that they dreamt up or maybe never dreamt up, but helping them to be in an environment where they can achieve their dreams, which happen to coincide with ours. It's the same job, only now the people I work with aren't carrying knives and guns as much, but it's the same job.
Adam: What do you believe are the key characteristics of the very best leaders, and what can anyone do to become a better leader?
Jim: They can buy Lodestar. It's a great book. I'm really proud of it, Adam because I got the opportunity to work with one of the greatest men I've ever met. And I met him by accident. His name is Dr. George Everly. What a personal story he has. It's just an inspiration for all of us. He had severe ADHD, and so many kids have that diagnosis now. He didn't learn that he was severely dyslexic until he was almost finished high school, and had never read a book. Loach Dog was his 29th book. He wrote an article in Psychology Today back in April of 2020, just a few weeks after COVID broke out in this country, and I read it. And I wrote him a fan letter, Adam, saying, this is wonderful.
And it was all about how he thought the lockdowns that were coming from COVID were going to impact our relationships. And he went back and he said, well, I'd love to chat with you. Why don't we do it? And we did. And we became COVID buddies. And then I started writing a letter to our customers every Sunday at Flowers called the Celebrations Pulse. Because at the beginning of COVID, I didn't know what to do. I didn't know if we'd have any business left at all. And I certainly didn't want to say, oh, buy our flowers in this environment.
So, I just started writing about what we were feeling and experiencing. And it was cathartic for me. I'm still doing it, fast forward four years now. And I was getting a lot of questions from our community about relationship things and psychological things that I wasn't properly equipped to even guess at the answer. So, I invited a few of my friends, including Dr. George Eberle, to be part of our connectivity council. Fast forward, George and I have been working closely together for a couple of years in answering these questions, running some webinars for our community on important topics like how to handle grief and how to handle special needs kids, how to handle relationships, how to handle the stress of COVID.
And all of a sudden now we have 10 million weekly subscribers and the dialogue and the engagements are off the charts. And so, George turned to me two and a half years ago and said, Jim, we've been doing all this work together and you're so unbelievably interested in relationships and the work I've been doing professionally all these years. Why don't we write a book together? Well, I was driving in a car with my wife in Florida, and George was on speaker when we had this conversation, and she gave me that look, don't you dare say yes, knowing that I might be a little busy.
And of course, I said yes, and it's been a great ride. And I've so enjoyed this two-and-a-half-year work process. Adam, the sessions working with him, virtually were so good. I started recording them because I couldn't learn as quickly as the information was coming my way. So, I kept them as we wrote the book. I kept going back to the recordings of those conversations. So how lucky am I? Look what I get to do. I get to talk to smart people like you. I get to work with George Everly and write this book together.
So yeah, I'm pretty proud of it. I think the best thing they could do to become the best leader they can be is to work on themselves. work on themselves to make sure that they're the best person they can be, that they have a genuine interest and curiosity in the people around them, that they demonstrate every day that they're interested in their success and your collective success and that you put their success ahead of yours. And I've heard Simon Sinek say a couple of times, leaders eat last. It's just a great way of reminding yourself, that sometimes people bestow on you in a larger organization, the privilege that you don't really want or deserve. So, you're the boss, you go first. No, no. My people go first.
Adam: You mentioned how 1-800-Flowers came together, this fortuitous moment. You had a customer who was putting his business up for sale. You discovered that you had a passion that you didn't realize you had for flowers. You scrapped together the $10,000 that you made by selling real estate bought a business, and became an entrepreneur. How did you take that business and turn it into the multi-billion-dollar business that it is today? And what did you learn from that experience that anyone listening to this conversation can apply to grow and scale their business?
Jim: First of all, it's been a long path. It's been many, many years. And I would say, as I look back, they demonstrate that you don't have to be particularly smart, but if you're working hard and you're curious you're willing to make mistakes. I think back, we wrote in the book about Thomas Edison, who was quoted as saying, I didn't make 10,000 mistakes. I proved that the 10,000 different ways that was not the way to go, which gave me the opportunity to discover the way to invent the light bulb. One of the things I've learned to do because I've worked with some great leaders over the years is, in fact, how to turn a mistake into a cultural learning lesson. By making fun of your own mistakes.
So, there's a lady who ran merchandising for us at 1-800-Flowers, and she took a big buffet in the office, a big stack of bookshelves, and she called it Jim's Wall of Shame. and she put some of our biggest duds on that wall. And she put a sign up, this Jim's Wall of Shame. I didn't realize it then, but as I think back, that was a cultural directional, saying we're not afraid to make mistakes, and we're irreverent enough that I can put up a sign that makes fun of the boss and put up all of his horrible mistakes. I didn't realize then, but I've realized since then, that she was so intuitive that it sent so many different cultural signals. that really benefited us as an organization. So, the point is, that we can learn from other people. You need to be curious. You need to keep moving forward and be as optimistic as you possibly can, even if you're faking it.
Adam: I really love that anecdote. Jim's wall of shame.
Jim: There were some beauts on there.
Adam: Don't be afraid of making mistakes. The only way you're going to achieve anything of any kind of significance is by being willing to make mistakes. You're going to make mistakes along the way. When you do make mistakes, don't run away from them. Own them and talk about owning your mistakes. Having a wall of shame, that's owning it.
Jim: Dr. George Everly taught me something. He said, one of the great barriers to good mental health is shame. And we all have these shameful moments. If I say it to you, I bet you're going back someplace in your memory of some moment you felt terrible shame. It could be when you were 12 years old. And he said to me, think back to your shame moments. He said, if it happened to somebody else, it would probably be hysterically funny. Yeah, it would be. He said, now here's the trick. You have to teach yourself to believe it was somebody else and laugh at it.
And he gave you some physical exercises to change where in your brain that memory is stored, to break that shell of shame around it so that you could laugh at it now. And that's a process he taught me and us to go through to compartmentalize that shame, deal with it, bundle it in a different way, and move it into a different part of your brain. I think that deals with a lot of things that we deal with in business. And once you learn how to do that, and you can laugh at your mistakes, share them, Make it part of your lore and your legend. You're making progress and you're setting the stage for the people around you to shed their shame too.
Adam: It's a really interesting topic and something that I've picked up from my conversations with so many different leaders across so many different backgrounds is many of the most successful leaders are highly self-deprecating, including many of the most respected, revered, serious leaders, generals, admirals, governors. When you get to know them, when you talk to them, just not presidential candidates, Well, that's a whole another conversation, man. I don't know how much time we have.
Jim: You're right. Some of the people I most admire, respect and they're terrific at self-deprecating.
Adam: And the quicker you are, the more willing you are to acknowledge that you're human, you have flaws, we all have flaws, we're all imperfect. What are our imperfections? Own them. Create your own wall of shame.
Jim: Celebrate them.
Adam: Celebrate them. I love that. So much of 1-800-Flowers’ success centered around your innovation when it came to marketing. coming up with the idea for 1-800-Flowers itself, acquiring the 1-800 number. What are your best tips for anyone listening to this conversation on marketing?
Jim: Well, I think it goes to when you start out with no money, you can't make big expensive mistakes. So, you have to learn to be scrappy. And I think you should always act like you don't have a big budget and you should always be looking to be scrappy and keep those dollars for when you really find an opportunity that you know is going to work, spend them. So we didn't have money and we had to be scrappy and we had to be deliberate. Innovation for us has always been about racing a new technology at it. And we've had several phases. We started out with a retail store and then created a chain of retail stores. Then we changed our primary access modality when we bought the number 1-800-FLOWERS, the first company whose name was a phone number. When we changed the name of our stores, people thought we were crazy.
And indeed, we probably were. But then in a few short years, we changed our little sleepy industry on its ear by becoming the number one brand in a few short years with no money. Good luck, yes, but no money. We did it by being scrappy and trying to do things on other people's nickel and trying to work with bigger companies who had big budgets to do something for them that they couldn't do for themselves. And so, for us, it was always about embracing the next innovation. Then it was the internet, and then it was mobile, and then it was social.
And now it's all about conversational commerce or engagement commerce, where we can use the tools of today to try and mimic a relationship, we had 40-something years ago, when we had one shop on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and we had genuine relationships with our neighbors. They were all customers too, but we saw them a lot more frequently than they bought something from us. We realized we were the centerpiece of a little community. Now we try and use technology to mimic that, to try and be meaningful in our customers' lives, and just like then, not just trying to sell them stuff all the time.
The big shift for us, which helped us to go to another level, is when we realize, yes, we're florists, and yes, we're bakers and makers, and we have brands like Harry and David, and Cheryl's Cookies in the Popcorn Factory, and Personalization Mall, and things remember, yes, we have a lot of stuff. But when we realized 10 years ago that we were really in the business of relationships, we started thinking about how we serve our customers to help them to have more and better relationships. What free things can we do for them that they're going to have more and better relationships, but for every selfish reason? If they have more and better relationships, there are going to be more birthdays they want to recognize, there are going to be more anniversaries, more new babies, and more moments of sympathy expression. If their universe of friends and family and relationships is bigger and broader, there'll be more reasons for them to transact.
And we will have earned their consideration by having free digital greeting cards for them, by reminding them of all the occasions they have asked us to remind them about. So they send a card, so they send a text, so they send a fun video. to recognize a birthday or a work anniversary. So, when we realized, yes, we sell stuff, but we're really in the relationship business, it was a big unlock for us.
Adam: I love that. Shifting your perspective from a focus on the transaction to a focus on the relationship. And it really revolves around being customer-centric. 100%. How can leaders create customer-centric cultures and customer-centric organizations?
Jim: What do you measure? What do you reward? What do you talk about? When you're doing a town hall, where are you shining a light? On a guy who did the best spreadsheet that quarter? Or for the gal who took 45 minutes of her own time to help her co-worker? who was trying to help a customer, it was clearly not a profit motive because you had two people tying up their time, but they knew it was the right thing to do. If you're shining a light on that, you're telling people what's important to you and what's important to the company.
Adam: I love that. You literally just wrote a book on how anyone can tap into the 10 timeless pillars of success.
Jim: It's the Cliff Notes of a Thousand Years of Self-Help book.
Adam: What can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?
Jim: I said at the beginning, I'll say it again. Make the commitment to read, to talk, to listen to people who've spent their lives working in these areas because whether you're a young whippersnapper like you, Adam, or a broken-down old guy like me, our brains are always working. They're either getting better, or they're getting worse. So they're always getting. You can decide, is it that we're getting better? Are we becoming a better person? Or are we getting more anxious? better at worrying. And when we realize whether we plan to or not, our brains are always going to be adapting every day. And we decide we're going to take control of what direction that's going. That's the game, Jim.
Adam: Jim, thank you for all the great advice, and thank you for being a part of 30 Minute Mentors.
Jim: Thanks, Adam. What a treat to talk to you. So many lessons we can learn from you and I can't wait for my sons to see this because they'd like to be you.
Adam: Amen. The pleasure was mine. What a highlight. Really enjoyed it.
Jim: Thanks, Adam.
Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.
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