This week, Jessica is joined by Ron Alvesteffer, the President and CEO of Service Express.
Ron doesn’t just talk about people-first culture, he operationalizes it. He’s built an entire growth engine around employee goals, clarity, and care, with a “why” that’s fundamentally based in service and support. He shares how to scale culture through intentional leadership, why accountability is a form of love, and how he balances relentless growth with human connection.
Ron also opens up about his own transformation as a leader, from over-indexing on performance to realizing that investing in people was the key to unlocking results. And the hard stuff, too: turnover, remote work, and how to lead through moments when things break.
About Ron Alvesteffer
During his 25+ years of ongoing leadership at Service Express, Ron has helped the company leverage double-digit annual revenue growth, expand its international footprint, create a unique performance-driven culture, and more. He is most proud of the strong company culture Service Express fosters through its Core Value to cultivate a culture of growth that empowers our people to achieve their personal, professional and financial goals. This shared goal has helped create opportunities for employee achievement and led to outstanding individual and company success.
Ron is a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization and World 50, a private community for CEOs and C-level executives at globally respected organizations to discover better ideas, share valuable experiences and build relationships that make a lasting impact.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronalvesteffer/
https://serviceexpress.com/about-us/leadership/ron-alvesteffer/
Jessica Kriegel:
Website: https://www.jessicakriegel.com/
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicakriegel
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jess_kriegel/
Culture Partners:
Website: https://culturepartners.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/culturepartners/
TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: This week on Culture Leaders, I sat down with Ron Alvis, effer, the CEO of Service Express. This company has grown from $3 million to over $300 million under his leadership with a billion In Insight. Ron doesn’t just talk about people First culture, he operationalizes it. He’s built an entire growth engine around employee goals, clarity and care. And in our conversation, he shares how to scale culture through intentional leadership, why accountability is actually a form of love and how he balances relentless growth with human connection. He opens up about his own transformation as a leader from over indexing on performance to realizing that investing in people was the key to unlocking results. And we talk about the hard stuff too, turnover, remote work, how to lead through moments when things break. For Ron leadership is about equipping others to win and having the courage to evolve yourself along the way. It’s a vulnerable, practical, and powerful conversation. Please welcome to the podcast Ron Effer. Welcome. Ron, I can’t wait for this conversation. Tell me what is your why?
Ron Alvesteffer: Yeah, my why is derived from Zig Ziglar quote, I don’t know if you know of Zig Ziglar. Remember him? I actually just got asked this morning at the gym if somebody knew who Zig Ziglar was, but he was a motivational speaker and sales motivational speaker. Zigs no longer with us, but he had this quote, and I have it right outside my executive area, and this has become my life quote, you can get everything you want out of life if you just help enough other people get what they want. And that’s how I’ve built my career and built our company at Service Express. That is my true north, my guiding light.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Wow. That’s a surprising why for a leader with the amount of success that you’ve had and growth that your business has had and also your focus on performance culture, right? I mean, so tell me what is the Service Express mission statement or the Service Express why?
Ron Alvesteffer: Yeah, our core value is taken right from that. So when I was named president in 2002, I have a teaching degree, I’m not a technologist, but I’m the CEO of a technology company. And so when I was named president in 2002, the first thing I aligned on was we are going to win with and through people. That’s going to be our number one competitive advantage, our number one strategic objective. And so we created our core value and it’s just cultivating a culture of growth that empowers our people to achieve their personal, professional and financial goals. So it’s really in essence Zigs quote, which is, I want to know, we have a goal setting program that we do for a thousand plus employees where they tell us, they put down their personal, professional and financial goals. We keep ’em on our intranet, company intranet, they’re private, and we have what we call Vision Talk.
So twice a year, every employee will have a vision talk with their direct leader and they’ll share their updated goals. Here’s how Service Express fits into my personal life right now. Here’s that work-life balance or integration or harmony, whatever you want to call it. Here’s important to me, here’s my professional goals, here’s what I want to achieve when I’m at Service Express and as we are growing company, as we create that growth, here’s where I want to play and then here’s my financial goals. I believe in having that conversation. What do you want to achieve and how do we create that opportunity? Again, not to just give it to you, but to empower you and to look for those opportunities to develop you and have you go after and get that. Because my theory has always been if we surround ourselves with the right people for Service Express, we find out what they want to achieve and we actually can create an environment where they can achieve all of those things Here, there’s not a market condition, a competitor, there’s nothing that can stand in our way if we do that Well, and that’s right back to Zig Ziglar.
You get everything you want out of life. If you help enough other people get what they want.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Well, and the results speak for themselves, right? We’ve gone from a $3 million company to a $300 million company with I set on $500 million this year, right?
Ron Alvesteffer: Well, 500 million in the near future. And then really thinking out towards a billion as we’re thinking now, that big goal that we always put Jim Collins, we call it A-B-H-A-G, big hairy, audacious goal out in front of us to get our mindset out of today and thinking towards the future, who do we need to be? What do we need to look like? What resources do we need? How do I need to grow myself as a leader to be that billion dollar company now?
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So how do you balance these two things? I mean, it sounds good, and I know from years of experience that it’s difficult to manage. I mean, just yesterday I was on a client call and they hired us because they literally said, the problem is we’ve got these huge growth goals and we’re not seeing enough speed and urgency and activation of our workforce, and we need them to stay focused and it’s all this energy put on, do more, do more, do more. And then there’s the burnout cultures. But it sounds like you’ve found this balance. How do you find the
Ron Alvesteffer: Balance? Yeah. Well, first of all, it’s like the hardest thing you can do. So when we talk about leading with people, and some people call that soft skills, and I say it’s the hardest skill you can have. Most people avoid it. It’s way easier to look at financial statements or KPIs or other things and avoid the people issues. But the magic is all in the people issues. So sometimes we get it perfectly. A lot of times we’re calibrating one way or the other, but it’s always, and I had an executive meeting this morning, we talked about this very thing is again, assessing do I have the right team for where we’re at now and where we’re going now? Some people have been with me since we are 3 million in revenue. There’s a lot of new people that have joined since then. There’s been people that were with us for a certain amount of time and then left we’re the right fit at a certain size or certain stage in growth and then maybe not as good a fit going forward.
And I think you have to really always be assessing your team, your leaders and yourself. I mean, this all starts with me. I talk with people. I talk about assessing talent. It starts with looking in the mirror and where am I at and what do I need to do to get there to do that? So I think when we talk about do we have the right team or not, we have to decide, have we surrounded ourselves with people that are good fit for where we’re at and where we want to go? So we’re a growing company. So I talked to our whole company about this and all of our leaders and I do onboarding with all of our new hires. And I’m like, if you don’t like change, if you don’t like being challenged and you don’t like growth, then this will be a horrible place for you.
And I love Service Express. We’re surrounded by amazing people. We have guests here today, they’re raving about, I love it, but it’s got to be people who want to be here and be on this journey with us. And that doesn’t, by the way, if you don’t want to do that, that doesn’t make us right and you wrong or one good and one bad. It just makes it different. So I think you got to really recruit and assess and surround yourself for people that want to go on that journey with you because there’s nothing more frustrating, I don’t think for a leader and really for the people you’re leading that if you don’t have that alignment because they’re not going to move as fast as you want to fast, they’re not going to be as into it. So you’re going to get frustrated, they’re going to get frustrated.
Just nobody wins on that. But when you get the right people for that and they want to be challenged and they want to grow and they’re pushing you, we’re at our best when we’re kind of pushing from the front lines up, that’s where I think the true magic happens. And so it really starts with just getting the right people for your organization. Now, I have some peers that I talk with and they talk about we want to grow, we want to grow. And I get a number of calls. We kind of have this growth story, and the first question I ask is like, well, why do you want to grow? And they’re like, well, what do you mean you grew? And I’m like, well, I know I did and that’s what I was brought in to do and that fits me and that’s what I want to keep doing. But why do you want to grow? How big do you want to grow? Don’t do it just because you think you should or because I do it, do it because it fits you. And if it doesn’t fit you, then you got to figure out what you want to be and who you hire would be different than who I hire. Again, not good or bad or wrong, just different. And so I think you really need to assess what your goals are and then surround yourself appropriately.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Well, that’s interesting. I mean, I don’t know a single company that isn’t in growth mode or trying to grow or wishes. There is a bias towards growth.
Ron Alvesteffer: There’s everybody says they want to grow, but not everybody wants to do what it takes to grow. And some people, I think it’s better fit for some people to say, this is where I’m good at this size. I mean, there’s certainly always an aspect of growing or dying and you can’t just do nothing, expect to say the same, you’ll whittle away. But there’s differences between that and the growth journey that I’ve been on that I’ve been driving towards, which kind of fit again, what I was hired in to do and my personality. That’s why I’ve been here almost 28 years. And to do that. So again, in what pace? And I always ask the question, but do you really want to grow? So everybody says they want to, but are you willing to make the changes? Are you willing to make the investment? Are you willing to take the shots, the lumps? People look at Service Express and our growth chart looks up into the right, and I promise you just within that chart that looks up into the right there is peaks and valleys as you drill in all the way through that. And you got to be willing to stay on that path and do that.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I would love to talk about adaptability and how you create not just an adaptable mindset at an individual level, but adaptability at an organizational level and when the entire engine has to pivot in response to the competitive environment or the economy or technology. Tell me about how you nurture adaptability at scale.
Ron Alvesteffer: Yeah, I think, and it is a challenge and I think that the first thing we do is we just lean into it. And again, talk about starting with onboarding my quarterly state of the companies we’re going to grow. There’s going to be change. Continuous innovation is one of our core tenets on our growth flywheel and that we always have to be improving and getting better, growing into where we want to go. And I think again, I’ll start with do I have the people that embrace that mindset, that want to go on that journey? Because once you have that and then you talk about the change you’re going to make, you get a lot of people what I call running to the problems, and I’ll be part of that. I can help do that, and they’re into it. If you don’t have the right people for you who don’t embrace that mindset, you’re going to get a lot of resistance.
So I really just like to lean into it and talk about this is our environment, this is part of our culture. Again, I’ve been here a long time and I always tell everyone, that’s why I’m still here because I feel like every three years I have the same title, but my job’s a little bit different. My focus is a little bit different that keeps me interested and engaged and energized. And if that energizes you, this will be a great spot because that’s part of who we are. And so again, I know I keep coming back to, but it’s all about being really intentional, purposeful about your people and your team.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: How did you develop your leadership skills? I mean, you started, you were a sales manager, You became A VP of sales, and then you very quickly became president and then CEO. And as your company has grown, you expanded globally, you’ve done acquisitions. I mean, where did you learn how to do that?
Ron Alvesteffer: Yeah, so a couple ways. I would say one is a lot of professional development on my own. And so again, one of our core tenets is professional development, invest in yourself. And so we require four books a year that our teams read or listen to or however they devour it for 20 years.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Wait, do you pick them or do they pick them?
Ron Alvesteffer: They pick them. I want them to pick ’em on their journey. It can be professional, it can be personal, it can be a blend. Again, invest in yourself. The better you are at home, the better you’ll be here. The better you’re here, the better I think you’ll be at home. I want the full person. So whatever they think is best for them, we’ll make recommendations. And sometimes there’s groups that do a book together, but the bottom line is, I just want you investing in yourself. And so for over 20 years, I average 12 books a year that I was doing to invest in myself. It’s like 10 pages a day over the course of the month is about the size of an average business book. And I would highlight, I create my own book summaries now I’ll highlight in Kindle. So now I go back to ’em and do that.
And so one is just investing in myself, always investing into the leader that I want to be. A lot is trial and error and just learning. I started out, I went through a rough patch early in my career where I was not a good leader. It wasn’t a great culture. I was too intense, too performance driven. I didn’t select right for my team. So there was again, frustration from me, frustration from them. There just wasn’t alignment within there. And I had to take a really hard look in the mirror and just think, man, I’m not the leader that I want to be. I’m probably not the employee I want to be. I don’t think I was the husband I wanted to be at the time and I need to change and change my focus and change my approach and how I go about doing this.
So that was a real moment in time in my career that I had to make that significant change. And when I did that, this is what opened up all those opportunities for me. And it’s still something, by the way, with my style, I’m pretty energetic and have an intense tone. I’m into it. And so sometimes even at home with my kids, I’ll be like, I’m not mad. I’m into it. And so I have to really watch that balance. When I laugh, I laughed hard and loud, and when I’m frustrated, my outdoor voice comes on. So it’s always something I work on. But I think just over time,
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: When was that change?
Ron Alvesteffer: So that was back in really the 99, 2000 that
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Was right when you became president
Ron Alvesteffer: Just before that. I was at this inflection point in my career. And when I made that change and decided to put people first, invest in my, I always wanted to, but I got away from it. I got too into, it’s easy to do and people always, you think you do, but you really put numbers first and you put performance first, and you really got to put people first and get the right people again who will deliver the performance. And then it’s easier to do when you have the right team. So that switch is what really opened up the opportunity as I came through. That funny thing happened when I started investing in people first and really, really doing a better job, who I surrounded myself with and then treating them better, investing in them, the performance took off and then all that led to me being named president in 2002.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So what happened? How did you notice? Was there an event or was it a slow realization? I mean, how do we unlock whatever that was for other people?
Ron Alvesteffer: Yeah, I don’t think there was. There was a number of things going on. Again, growing company, really small at that time, trying to figure it out out, great people that I was working with and just started slowly happening. And it’s one of those things that frustration builds behavior starts to change, things aren’t going your way. One of those, again, when things aren’t going, I will dig in and get gritty and do that and grit’s good and digging in is good, but I can go really singular focused and I just did that too much. And you see that you’re having turnover. People aren’t buying into you. Sales results aren’t where they want to be and all that’s happening and my peers and the founder are talking to me. I just know it’s not going well. And just kind of came to this inflection point of frustration to kind of throw your hands. I got to do something. And the do something, which it typically is, is look in the mirror and change you first
Ron Alvesteffer: Figure out where you’re at. And that’s what I had to do at that time.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Wow. So I mean, it’s funny because writing a book right now, and I’ve been talking about this very thing and you seem to have exemplified it. I mean, what you’re describing is you were in the action trap, right? We’re not getting the results. We need more action, do more. And you start put pressure on people and you think you know the best way and you’re trying to get people to do it the way that you want them to do it. And that ends up leading to this burnout, not just for you, but for them. I mean, everyone’s losing trying to impose your will on other people.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: That’s right. Because you think you know best and everyone’s looking around who is this guy, right?
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah. And so the shift, I mean what you’re talking about, not to get too woo woo about it, but from that mentality is based in fear. We’re not getting enough. We’re going to lose. We’re not going to make it. I’m not going to win. And so you have to do the opposite of fear, which is love, which is thinking about the other, not romantic love obviously, but the kind of love that Thomas Aquinas talked about, which is willing the good of another and helping. And when you shift from fear to love and you think about focusing on others, then you’re able to enable other people to thrive and then you create even greater success than you could have alone. Is that what you went through?
Ron Alvesteffer: That’s it. We call it care.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: John Maxwell
Ron Alvesteffer: Says people don’t care how much until they know how much you care. People didn’t know. I’ve lost that point where people knew I cared about them
And I probably didn’t care about them as much as I should. And even our culture today I talk about is a blend of care plus performance and the right care with the right people for your group will drive the performance. And I think what I find having gone through that myself and what I find with our leaders as we’ve grown and when we scale is that’s skin. It’s very tenuous. It’s trying to get that perfect balance. And where I see people make the mistakes are two ways. One, they do like I do, they over index on performance. People don’t know they care. They feel like they’re just, I’m only as good as what my performance metrics say I am for that month. And as long as it’s going good, I’m in good graces. But if it’s not I’m, you can get short-term results out of that. I’ll call it management. It’s really not leadership,
Ron Alvesteffer: But you won’t get long-term sustained and you won’t get loyalty and you won’t get commitment. And by doing it that way, the other way that I see is people over index on care, which they think means everyone’s got to be happy. I’m not going to have any hard conversations. I’m not going to coach you. I’m not going to challenge you on everything. We’re going to avoid hard topics and I just want everybody to be happy, happy, happy, happy.
That doesn’t work either. And in fact, when I’ve seen leaders over index in that area, it is always interesting. They end up having the lowest engagement scores in the company because people aren’t growing, they’re not learning, they’re not achieving, there’s not accountability. They see all that happening and they get frustrated in that part too. And so care doesn’t mean not challenging. So now when it goes right would be like, I care about you and so I’m going to coach and challenge and I’m going to celebrate everything you’re good at and great and I’m going to say, but to get where you want to go back to your vision talks and where we’re going, here’s some areas of opportunity and here’s what we need to do to work on that. I’ve been doing a number of blogs around performance feedback going through that right now, and I’m going through with my team.
And my goal is always, some people are like, I’m going to be a hard grader on performance metrics and some people want to be, I’m like my goal. And I start off telling ’em, my goal is not to be a hard grader and my goal is not to just cheer lead you and never challenge you. My goal is as a coach is that I want this to be a very valuable whatever, 45 minutes or whatever that we spend together. So you walk out of here and you know exactly what you’re really good at and celebrate it for and appreciate that, but then also challenge to where do you need to grow? And I care about you. I have my support and the support of others to do that. And the other thing I’ll just say about performance reviews like that is it should really be a culmination of all the things we’ve been talking about through the year anyways, it’s just putting down in that form. I still believe in them, but that can’t be the only time people hear it. And I always make sure that we’re on the same page and I’m like, is there anything in here that surprised you? If there is, I didn’t do my job as a leader because there should be absolutely no surprises. You should be walking in a performance review with me already having the answers and knowing everything. It’s just about sitting down and kind of constructing it and how do we use it to go forward?
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Totally. So what we talk about is the mindset you have to have as a leader is coming from that place of care.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: And then you have a responsibility as a leader to drive clarity, alignment and accountability around your purpose, your strategy and your culture to get results. So you come from the place of care and then you take accountability for what it is you as a leader have to do. And love is accountability, right? I mean, I care about you enough to hold you accountable to the goals so that we and you can be successful here. And that requires hard work. It requires conversations that are sometimes difficult. It requires leaning into it. We’ve seen, if you look at REI, right, classic example of over-indexing on care and then they’ve been failing for the last two years. Their employees are unionizing even though everything they’ve done has been about, we care about employees, but they’ve missed the, and what are we supposed to do here, which is clarity, alignment and accountability on purpose, strategy and culture. You miss that and you’ve missed the entire thing. You’re just singing kumbaya once again. And that doesn’t work either.
Ron Alvesteffer: That doesn’t work. That’s exactly what I was saying. When you over index on that, it doesn’t create alignment and it gets people more frustrated for that. I think a great culture means I know it’s expected of me. I know the value that my work brings and the impact I’m having, so that’s engagement and I’m recognized and rewarded for that and get future opportunities for that, whatever that may look like. And then here’s the thing is when you have the right people and you’re all working towards those same goals, that’s when it becomes more fun because you’re just, I think some of the most fun you can have in is solving challenging business problems together with smart people that you care about and trust. That’s what fun is. And you can’t mistake fun of happy hours and cookouts and all those things and then not do the alignment coaching that’s just goofing off.
And we do all that, but it’s like it’s not the focus. It’s that we do it, we care about each other and we have fun, but that’s not in place of culture. And I think people can make that mistake and think that’s culture and it’s not, again, culture’s not soft. It is hard. This is, and great teams, when you have a relationship, there’s always saying great teams know how to argue and debate like a great marriage or any great relationship. If I ever hear somebody say, well, we never argue or we never have any turnover, I’m like, I don’t think it’s a big red flag because I say, you’re not talking about the right things. You’re not talking about the real things.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah, there’s a tricky balancing act though for leaders leaning into care, driving clarity, alignment and accountability. It does require a certain amount of surrender because you have to give up that you know best because you got, I mean, how many employees do you have?
Ron Alvesteffer: A thousand?
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: You got a thousand people collectively. Those 999 people know way more than you. And so you have to give up a little bit. You have to just focus on what you can control, have faith in the people, drive accountability, and then just take the next right action that you can coming from that place of care. And so it’s funny because you let me not be insulting right now, but you stereotypically look like the kind of guy who, you hear the word surrender and thinks never surrender, but it does require that certain amount of letting go in leadership to be successful. Does that feel right to you or how does that resonate with you?
Ron Alvesteffer: No, that’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. You do have to let go. If you try to hang on too tight and micromanage everything, you frustrate yourself, you get burned out, you burn everybody out, you get run right in the ground. So you got to trust. So again, make sure you have the right team around you. And then for a scaling company like us, it’s the right systems and tools.
So it’s combined with that. If you create repeatable processes and systems with the right tools and you have the right people, that’s where you get amazing predictable results. If you only have the right people without the right tools, it can be a little bit of chaos. Or if you have the right tools without the right people, you’re not getting the maximum. So we really focus on people, process, technology blend together, creates repeatable results. And then we have a really robust performance measurement system that start at the KPI company level drilled down by department, by region, by office. Every individual in the company has one, it’s called an ROI stands for responsibilities, objectives and indicators. And so I have one, I fill it out monthly with my key performance indicators. It’s on our company intranet. Everybody can see it. So everybody in the company has that. And so if you measure everything, what’s going on? And again, I focus mostly on the right people driving the right results. But yeah, you can’t, that’s how I keep track of it at this size. From 3 million to 300 plus that combination of people, performance process and technology, that combination which has allowed us to scale.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I would love if you could share a story about what this looks like in action going back in your career, thinking about a time when you were at a decision point or when you encountered a challenge, maybe a macro challenge or a micro challenge, and how this mentality of care along with accountability allowed you to break out of crappy results.
Ron Alvesteffer: Yeah. Well, gosh, there’s been a number of times over the years, again, going back to that early time in my career, that was all born out of substandard results that we’ve done that. I mean, COVID was a time that we had to go through together and we still wanted to grow the company. We wanted to keep everybody employed. We wanted to keep everybody safe, healthy, but we didn’t give up. We still wanted to grow the company. What could we do through this? And so we got together. I remember at that time, it was five years ago right now, and we were meeting every day as an executive team and aligning on what the plan was and what we were going to do. And even when we sent everybody home, everybody had their key performance indicators, here’s what we’re going to focus on and let’s just stay focused on one, everybody’s healthy first.
Two, everybody’s got their setup at home, which we were able to do really quickly and now what can we do? And through that came great opportunities people, we learned to recruit virtually that within a week or two, our technical training we learned to do virtually. And it was kind of interesting. It was stuff we talked about and thought about, but now we are forced to do it. And again, when you have the right people, they’re like, we’ll figure that out. We got that Ron, we’ll keep you updated and here’s how we’ll do that. And it’s just great to see everybody confront that challenge head on and rally around it to do that. So I mean it’s been in every aspect of the organization it, it’s how we do everything.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Did you guys notice the kind of productivity overwhelm shortly after COVID, how everyone kind of experienced suddenly a ton more meetings and people were just getting a little bit stretched in that time? Did you guys go through that too?
Ron Alvesteffer: Yeah, I mean it just changed. It came from face-to-face and which can be energizing to everything’s over teams and in Zoom, and I’m sure there was some of that. I’m very proud and happy that we got a lot of feedback that compared to sometimes even compared to how spouses were experiencing that I did weekly, we weekly updates, here’s where we’re at, here’s what we’re focused on, here’s where we’ll go. And we got great feedback to keep everybody be very open about what we’re focused on and what we’re working on and what’s going on. So I think through that we did really well. I think the more challenging part, honestly, with COVID was coming out of it, nobody was on the same page. I mean the going home was easier because the sense that everybody did it, you knew their clear pattern. And then coming out of it, it was like, do we come back? And we came back for a while, then we sent everybody home, and then it’s around just within our own country. And then other countries, some people were back, we’re still going through that. How many people are back, how many days a week? How many you still hear about in the news? So I think the more challenging part has been coming out of COVID and how do we work best.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So what’s your position on it now with regards to being in the office or being at home with your employees
Ron Alvesteffer: Right now? So we have corporate headquarters in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We have a regional headquarters in Denver and then a European headquarters just north of London in Bedford. And so if you’re within 45 minutes of a main office like that, we want you in three days a week, which are typically Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday that people are in. And then Monday and Friday can be hybrid on that. And so that’s where we currently sit and we will see how does that continue to go that way? Do you go more to remote or do you go more coming back? I think we’re in a good spot right now sitting that it’s interesting. And look, I’m in the office guy and I didn’t stop coming in during, I had a crew that was in a warehouse and we had ’em spread out, but I had three kids in high school at home and I’m usually in the off.
I like being in here, getting my work done and then going home. And so I like being together and I like connecting in person. I love the flexibility that we have and I love with teams and Zoom that I can talk face to face with my European leaders and teams and nationwide here. But I think that we do miss something when we’re not together to do that. So we’re just trying to find that right combination of Blend, which we’ve always tried to do because again, we’re spread out. We have a thousand employees nationwide and in Europe. And as we came back through that, of course there was natural hesitation to come back in. But we did hear, we tend to hear a lot when people do get together like, oh, that was so good to be together and to connect. And it makes our teams calls stronger when we have that personal connection and relationship. So trying to find that blend is I think always something we’re going to do. Again, we’re a larger company, spread out that we’re always going to have that because I’ve got people that I’m going to connect to all over. So I always got to find that balance.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So you’re listening to people, you’re asking questions, you’re trying things, you’re adjusting. I mean, it sounds like you’re just having conversations about it on an ongoing basis to see where the best fit lives
Ron Alvesteffer: Because it’s going to continue to evolve and we’re always going to have the flexibility, which I do too, flexibility when I do need to work from home, I have that. And I think this is part of what’s the kind of how do we think we work best and what’s the kind of company we’re trying to create and just saying, here’s our plan for doing that. And if that jives with what you’re looking for, that’s great, and if it doesn’t, I totally understand, but that would probably mean we’re not a good fit together. I’m not trying to be a great fit for everybody. I’m just trying to be like, here’s who we are. Put it out there and attract the people. Say, I want to be part of that.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah. Well, it’s a beautiful story. I mean, I’m so impressed with the amount of success that you’ve had, and I love the way that you’ve gone about it. I mean, it’s a rare quality in a leader. It sounds like it took a lot of personal reflection to get to the point where you realized that maybe the way you were gripping so tightly to results and what people should be doing, it didn’t work and you let go and look at what happened is pretty remarkable.
Ron Alvesteffer: I think that’s, and I read a lot of biographies and study up on company’s success stories, and I haven’t really heard of a successful journey that didn’t have some kind of moment or multiple moments like that. And you got to be willing to go through those challenges and fight through it. And I could have just quit and walked away, this is frustrating, I don’t like it. I’m going to go get another job. And I see too many people do that. And there certainly comes a time when you need a change, but there also comes a time when you need to fight through some things and figure it out. And I remember I did, I was at a leadership conference a number of years ago, and they had us do a quick lifeline, think back from when you were born and the highs and lows of your life. And so we took five or 10 minutes and kind of charted it out. And then he said, now look at your highest highs and what stands out to you. And as I looked at my highest highs, what stood out, and I was working with a couple other people and they had the same realization. The highest highs came pretty soon after some of the lowest lows.
And it’s on the other side of that, what did you learn? What we able to work through, fight through to get to that launches you to a new level. And if you never fight through something, you’re going to hit that wall everywhere you go. And I don’t care if it’s at Service Express or another company, and I mean you see it when you look at resumes or you see it on LinkedIn that when someone’s, every couple of years, they’re off to their next exciting thing. That’s a red flag. That’s like at some point because you’re going to find that with any company and people will find it here. It’s not perfect. Are you willing to work through it and help us go through it or are you just like, I’m out. And that’s what I found in my career and I think that’s why I’ve been able to be here so long is you do have to fight through those things.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah. Well, one way to call it, it’s fighting through difficult things. Another way to call it is stop fighting reality, right? I mean, I think a lot of people, they resist the way things are, and the other way of looking at it is accept the way things are. Stop fighting reality. Have faith in the team and the higher power and your ability to whatever, focus on what you can control and take the next right action and keep moving forward. I mean, all of my highest highs were after very, very low lows. There’s a great book on this called Falling Upward, and it’s about that you got to fall to go up and so highly recommended. But
Ron Alvesteffer: If people are listening to this, I would suggest do that 10 minutes real quick, highs and lows and just see what you find on that. And even as a company, the things we do really well today, were broken at some point.
Everything we do really well, it was a problem we fixed, we identified it and then we fix it. What I always tell people, we’ll fix every problem. I mean, some take longer than others, but if you hang with us, we will get it figured out and we’ll fix it. That’s been our track record. And I tease and go, I wish you had a CEO that could get it right the first time, but you don’t. You got me. And I’m a big go forward and I’d rather just go forward making mistakes and fixing ’em than sitting back and not doing anything and trying to get it perfect. So that’s just part, again, is leaning into who we are and what our culture is and how we view the world.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah. Well that’s beautiful. So my last question is what is something that you don’t get asked about very often in these types of interviews that you wish you were asked more often?
Ron Alvesteffer: Yeah, I think we touched on it a little bit, but I think when you talk about a great culture, a strong culture, I think sometimes people think that means no turnover or that means that you can never have those hard conversations. And I think part of building a great culture is knowing who doesn’t fit or who was a good fit for a while and who’s not now. And how you navigate that is really important too. And I’ve done this well and I’ve done it bad where you can get frustration, they can be frustrated. It gets into a frustrated, I quit or you’re fired. But really when we do it the best and when I do it the best is you come to the realization together of I think this is just not the right fit anymore. And I think what we need and what somebody’s offering is different and say, and that’s okay.
We’ve got to this point and we’ve had a number of times where we say, maybe it’s a different position, we could shift you and you’d be great there. Or it could be the time has come for you to find your next opportunity that’s the right fit here, no longer that. And I think if you can do that in care and in love, I think that can leave a lot of stress. Some people say if you ignore that, some of the biggest stress you can put on your people is keeping ’em in a position where they’re struggling or they’re failing or they’re frustrated, they know it, everybody knows it, but nobody’s doing anything about it. That to me, is the worst. That is total stress and frustration. So I’d rather lean in when we’ve done that before. We’ve had a number of times where people, they look relieved like, yes, I get it.
I agree. I knew this was coming. And then they go somewhere else. And what I love is when you connect with ’em a year, two years later and they’re doing great and they’re happy, and you’re like, that’s a win, that’s a win-win. So I think it’s just talking about turnover and what’s right is like that’s part of building a great culture because if you don’t have of that and you keep people who aren’t a good fit or who aren’t doing the job or don’t want to be there or have negative attitudes, you’re impacting so many people in your organization and you’re going to chase the ones that you want to keep away if you don’t do that. And so it’s hard. I just spoke with a newer leader recently and he had to go through it with a couple and talking about how challenging it was, and I’m like, it is challenging and it is hard. And if it didn’t bother you, you wouldn’t be the right person. You wouldn’t be the right leader. We’re people. Of course it bothers you, but you have to think about your team and you have to think about what’s best for that person, what’s best for your team members. And if you kind of keep that sort of greater good in mind, it helps to make those decisions to go through it.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: You sound just like our CEO Joe Terry. He has the same mentality. And it’s funny, I have seen Joe let people go because of exactly what you said, it wasn’t the right fit for us and it wasn’t the right fit for them. And the way that he approaches the conversation with them coming from love, asking them about what really fulfills them, if they’re feeling like they’re a fit here, then they get let go. And then a couple weeks later, you see these people writing these long poetic love letters to Joe Terry on LinkedIn thanking him for his approach and his leadership, and he just fired them. But the way he goes about doing it, it is a win-win. There is a way to do it. The opposite way is you get frustrated, you don’t have the conversation, you’re not transparent, you surprise someone, and then it’s this break and nobody wins. So I appreciate you saying that there is a better way, and it’s totally true, and it’s the way that we should all be doing it, but we don’t because we’re afraid we don’t because we don’t want to have difficult conversations. And that’s an ego thing that’s coming from pride in myself and what I want.
Ron Alvesteffer: And it’s hard. And sometimes you kind of work yourself up to being frustrated and mad to do the hard thing because I’ve been in that position because it, sometimes it’s your fuel to do the right thing, but I’m always inspired when I see our leaders do it, and it always inspires me. It’s like if you do it the right way, Joe does, it just feels so much better, and it just is so much better for everybody. And so again, I’ve done it both ways and it feels way better when you do it the right way with humanity.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: And your numbers speak for themselves. You do have very high retention levels. You’re a great place to work. I mean, you’ve got the growth and you’ve got all the people metrics to prove that this works. Yeah. So thank you for your leadership. Thank you for joining us on the podcast today. It was such a pleasure to learn from you. We’re really grateful that you came.
Ron Alvesteffer: Oh, thank you for having me. Enjoyed the conversation. Appreciate it.