Workplace Innovation from Within

Jose Leal (00:05):

Welcome to rHatchery.live. I'm Jose Leal today. My partner Matt Perez, unfortunately is sick, so I'm doing this on my own. Kara, we're on our own on this one, so welcome. I'd like to have you say a little bit about yourself and introduce yourself and the work that you're doing, and we can start our conversation.

Kara Redman (00:27):

That sounds good. I'm Kara Redman. I'm the CEO and founder of a brand strategy and performance marketing agency called Backroom. We've been around nine years this month. We're very excited about our growth and we've been really focused on redefining what it means to be an agency, what traditional agency models look like, and what it means just to work in society, getting rid of the 19-5, and the restrictions that it places on employees and, and frankly, the output of our work. So it's a little bit about us.

Jose Leal (00:55):

Wow, that was a lot about you. So, it sounds like you've got sort of this message that you've just clearly articulated, which is great. What does that mean? How did you get to that? Like, you're the founder. What's the story behind that? How did, had you hit upon this as something to be done?

Kara Redman (01:17):

Well, I worked a lot for other people first. So, I had a lot of opportunity to figure out what the environment was that I wanted, where I thrived, where I saw my peers thriving. And I think that the traditional model of working Jose is very one size fits all. It's, there's sort of, we're born to the society where we've just accepted blind that we work during these certain hours and we don't, and we're not, and there's this sort of siloed approach to our life. And we hear things like work-life balance, where I've always felt like they're very much intertwined, right? If I have 15 minutes, I'd like to go flip my laundry or go for a walk. And you have to really fit what are your natural needs and natural urges throughout the day to be expressive in other ways. And you have to fit those into boxes.

Kara Redman (02:01):

And that just didn't really work well for me. And looking around it didn't work well for a lot of other people. So, and the more and more we practice this, and, you know, back really was an experiment to see if I was right or wrong. But for people that are very high achievers, high performers, people who are attached to outcomes, people who want to do really great work with great people and experiment and be creative, I find don't really thrive in that environment for the most part. And so I thought, you know, if we really put people in environments where they do their best work, will we get their best work? And so far it's been true.

Jose Leal (02:37):

That's awesome. I couldn't agree more. I personally have had the same experience, and that's part of the reason that we've started radical and the work that we're doing with rHatchery. So, tell me a little bit about, you know, today's topic is about doing a win-win for employer and employee. What's this workplace innovation that you're talking about from within? What does that mean?

Kara Redman (03:07):

Yeah, I struggle with the word innovation because it's certainly not something that I feel like is newer novel in terms of what we're doing. I think it's just, we're another group that's trying this approach. So, for us it's win-win because we're in professional services. So, for us, it's employee, which is, you know, me and leadership, it's our employees, the talent that works for us, it's our clients, and then it's our clients' customers. And so ultimately to be in great business, like everyone has to be healthy and well, but people have, because they want outcomes for their customers and their clients, right? So we have a lot of, you know, mouths to feed, quote unquote. We have a lot of people that we need to really consider. And for us, we were thinking, what if we really take people's interests at heart and listen to them what they need, whether it's our clients, our employees, or our client's customers, and just really focus on delivering that and rowing in the same direction, and removing ego and removing these ancillary goals that we have for ourselves as individuals.

Kara Redman (04:04):

Removing that, you know, eye from the statements, and focus on delivering really great things that impact other people. And it requires that we're really deliberate about the clients that we take on, right? We have to leave in it, we have to have a shared passion, we have to have shared goals. It requires that our clients are really intentional about what they're building. So, it requires an extra layer of thought work and brain space that I don't think a lot of people want to get into. But once you do get into that brain space, then everything just kind of fits, right? You can't really control and calculate all these things and how they're going to work, because people are people. But I think when you really are sitting and being open and flexible and going with the flow of how other humans are working and the mistakes that we make just as part of our humanity, that it's just much more forgiving and the outputs are beautiful, and I think they hit better outcomes.

Jose Leal (04:51):

So let's take a step back. Let's look at the idea of sort of big picture of what you think the fundamental issue is here, because you're talking about, you know, you've sort of described this relationship between employee, employer the system that dictates how we live in, in the workplace. Is that the fundamental issue? What is do you think the fundamental issue here that you're overcoming?

Kara Redman (05:25):

There are so many, right? I think there's so many. We can't tackle them all as one individual or one organization. And you know, growing up in my career, I was taught that it was, you know, your, your shareholders were first, your customers were second, and your employees were last, right? And I get it. I understand why that model exists. I understand, you know, the free market, I understand how the economy works, I get it on a numbers basis. But I think that we, we discount, because I don't think we've had the research in the past, you know, when I was in my twenties, now I'm in my forties, we just didn't have the research that showed productivity metrics and how people actually thrive and how taking care of actual people as individual humans can impact things like results for shareholders, right? You don't have to burn people out.

Kara Redman (06:11):

You don't have to treat them poorly. You don't have to create these environments in which people are crying on their way to work. I mean, Jose, I had these kind of fantasy visions when I was driving to work in the morning and I was like, I want to get into a car accident that's just bad enough that I can just sleep in the hospital for a couple of days and no one gets hurt. And I'm just sitting here going, this is wrong. This is really wrong. And I wasn't alone in that thinking, right? It's like, how can I get out of this just for a couple days, just not be needed by anyone so I can rest so I can see my kids so I can do something for myself. And I think it's a big problem. And while there are a lot of different systems in place, and I think even as a small business owner, just what feels like it's punitive, the amount of taxes you have to pay as a business owner, we're not incentivized, right?

Kara Redman (06:58):

To move away from giant corporations as just regular citizens. The issue that we're focusing on is challenging leadership. So while we can't do all of the things, the one thing that we can't do is lead by example to sort of deconstruct what it means to work in a nine to five environment to deconstruct what a traditional agency model looks like for clients, to deconstruct this idea that it has to be competitive and opaque, and that we have to be dishonest or that we have to defend value constantly. That it's okay if a client leaves, it's okay if an employee leaves. You don't have to take it personally and just bring human aspect into your work and celebrate humanity and the messiness that goes into it. Give another grace. Give ourselves grace that that's the problem that we're trying to tackle as we're removing all of these weird and unhelpful systems that turn humans into cogs in a machine.

Jose Leal (07:50):

So, I may not have understood this, but I'll ask the question in a second. But back to your point about being in the car and feeling the way you did with the numbers like 87% disengagement, right? And stress levels and burnout at record levels. It wasn't just you, right? And it wasn't just a lot of the people we know this is a pandemic of employee employer relationships not working. And I, having been in management, I recognize that it goes both ways. It isn't just being an employee that's difficult. Being a manager is also difficult today. But you said something about it's okay if you lose an employee. It's okay if you lose a client that I understand you to say that we shouldn't care about that. What you mean by that?

Kara Redman (08:46):

No, of course. I think it's, there's sometimes where you think about different environments and just the, the buzzy energy in different workplaces, right? And there's the one of fear-based, and then there's the one of an abundance mindset. And when I talk about the fear-based mindset, it's we cannot lose this client. We have to defend at all costs. This employee can't leave us because it makes us feel a lot warm and fuzzy inside when everybody wants to work for us, or we don't want to have to really worry about going out and getting more or even worse. We don't want to worry about the feedback of why they're leaving, right? And so I think that when you can remove this fear-based and this need to be perfect all the time and need to always have it right, and you can go, Hey, why are you leaving?

Kara Redman (09:26):

What worked? What didn't work? Sometimes it's not about you. Sometimes it is. And then you get grade feedback and not everybody has that mindset and that mentality of there's always going to be more, every change, every disappointment is a learning opportunity. Again, humans are messy. Everything's messy. Life is messy. That need to kind of control, mine's especially messy. The need to control everything and have people working for you. And you talked earlier about the dynamic between employee and employer. This idea that you should be lucky to work here, and I'm paying you to work here and look at you. What a privilege for you. No, there's shared value in that, right? And if somebody wants to leave and do something else, or if they're just, you know, this wasn't when I thought, or I'm really burned out, then they can go. I mean, I had somebody leave, I think it was 2020, who was like, this is just a lot more than I thought and I'm burning out and it wasn't what I expected.

Kara Redman (10:15):

And I want to see what it's like to do my own thing. That person still does a lot of like contract freelance work for us when we have some overflow. You know, it's like there was an opportunity to get angry and feel a certain way about it or to say, yes, I would like to see you do. Well, we send that person work all the time, right? And then they help us out. What a beautiful way to end a relationship. So it's just a mentality shift, I think, and bringing the element into it and how we all help each other, even if it didn't work out the way that we'd hoped.

Jose Leal (10:46):

That fits so well with the way we see the world here at Radical. And so, the question that I have for you is because we've sort of in some ways idealized what the future company will look like. We wrote the book Radical Companies to define what we think is a truly human company. And that means for us, a company that is more about what you've just described, the relationships the individual's needs, the ability for individuals to come together and make the impact that they seek to make, rather than having this imposed what we call a fiat force type of mentality. Again, expressed by the way you talk about mindset. So my question to you is, that's sort of an extreme in today's world, this idea that companies will be co-managed and co-owned. And obviously that's not the case today. Do you think that the work you're doing is sort of contributing to that direction? Or do you think that the work you're doing is sort of an endpoint? In of itself?

Kara Redman (12:02):

I don't think that anything's ever an endpoint. I think that every generation, whether it's in the working world or just out in society, we're always a little offended by what the next generation's doing, right? Cause it's like, I had to do with this way and now you guys get that, what, you know. So there's always a little bit of that, I think, whether it's like new music or what we're into or what is this TikTok thing that these kids are doing these days, right?

Jose Leal (12:23):

ChatGPT, what?

Kara Redman (12:25):

Right? No, and it's like mind blowing at the time. And you know, our generation, it's exponential. I think it happened a lot slower, you know, a hundred years ago. But I don't think that there's ever an endpoint. I know that humans are adaptively evolve, you know, there are a lot of pushbacks towards, like, you're talking about ai and it's like, what if, you know, we have robots doing everything. We were all just chilling. Like, that's a great thing that I would love to be in that time, right? So, I don't think that anything that we're doing is groundbreaking. I don't think that anything that we're doing is you know, the end all Beall, I think, I don't think there's a one size fits all for any company or any organization. It really does become about, you know, like you said, truly human organizations.

Kara Redman (13:04):

You've got to listen to the people that are in it. You've got to embrace them where they are. And I think that, I don't know that we're contributing to any sort of like co-ownership type model. I think that the trends that are happening and how workplace organizations and operations are developing right now are enabling different models and just open-minded thinking. I think in our model, we very much still need leadership because the people that work at Backroom, for example, they're here because they want the things that backroom enables. They don't want the entrepreneurship, they don't want the headache of co-ownership. They don't want, like, my team has told me I love that I can just shut down a Thursday. Cause we're four day, week down. I go, hang on my family, I don't think about this. Right? I don't have to worry about the things that you Kara have to worry about as the business owner. So the co-ownership model isn't something that we're really enabling, you know? So I do think that there are lots of different, it's like a spectrum. There's hybrid models, there's different, different models that work. Some want to have that truly shared, collaborative, co-owned. We're all in it together mentality. But I know that on my team and my organization, having the ability to step in and make executive decisions and provide that leadership with input is really paramount, paramount to the type of work that we're doing.

Jose Leal (14:17):

Yeah, I'm not sure that we didn't lose connection there for a second. Hopefully. All is good. Can you still hear, okay?

Kara Redman (14:26):

See you, you popped away for just a second.

Jose Leal (14:29):

Yeah, I think we may have a bit of a signal issue. Thank you, Carlos. So, the things that you've just described, they're very much in alignment with the way that we see things as well. So it isn't about an endpoint, it isn't about here's the way to do it. That's right. And it sounds like you understand that there is no right, there's only what's good in the moment for the people that are there. And I a hazard to guess that's the way you guys work. Can you give us a couple of examples? One of the types of things that you address in the workplace that an actual example of something that that is typical of what you guys must address and how you would do address it? Sort of what is the way that you improve that situation in some way?

Kara Redman (15:30):

Yeah, I, deconstructing things is big for us. There's a lot of unlearning, I think just as a society and all that we have to do, right? Like the things that we just accept as norms, our mentality at backroom is why we do things that way, right? We're always challenging the status quo. And so one of those things, just a very general basic examples, holidays, you know, we don't follow a traditional banker's holiday schedule because we have people from different backgrounds and cultures. And it's important for us to not just assume that we're taking on the traditional white American holidays, right? Because that's not what's important to everybody. You know, I learned what Juneteenth was years ago from someone on my team, so we incorporated that and like, I had no idea. Right? And I just didn't know I was ignorant to that.

Kara Redman (16:14):

And so, it really like comes back to the same mentality of everything that I talked about before, just listening. So we actually have in our employee onboarding kit where we do a survey for things that are like, when do you work best? What are the tools, resources, training that you're hoping to have to support you in the role? You know, what do you, how do you want to grow in this role? So we can keep an eye on opportunities as they come up. And another one is what days holidays, special personal days of observes do you want to have off so that you can go and celebrate or observe that date? That is really, frankly none of our business. You know, it could be celebrating a, you know, an anniversary for no alcohol, you know, I don't need to know that, but if it's important to you, let us know. We'll make sure it's on you out of office calendar. So that's just a very simple practice I think that any employer can pull in and just let people observe the holidays they want to observe.

Jose Leal (17:04):

And it's the kind of thing that you work with your clients on those types of broadening your vision of what is the new norms, the norms that you create as a team, like you said, with that person on your team that brought in that that knowledge, that brought in that understanding of their holiday. Is that the kind of thing that you sort of say, pay attention to these things in your workforce, in your community?

Kara Redman (17:36):

No, because we don't come and say, here are things that we're doing for ourselves, so they to do them too. What we do, since our work is so deeply rooted in brand, that does apply to, of course, the outward facing identity, but also the internal systems and processes, right? So if we have a client come to us, for example, and say, we want to be positioned in this way, we want to be an employer who has that, we want to attract this type of talent, we'll go in and do a gap analysis for them and say, Hey, these are the five values that turned up and our exercises that you said were incredibly important to them, and I have no actions that you're actually taking underneath three of them to make them true. Right? So it's the accountability practice of it. So, a really strong brand is going to have a, you know, a positioning that's clear to everyone there for internal and external.

Kara Redman (18:19):

It's going to have a promise that you have to your clients and your employees, and that you're going to have what we call our, your pillars, right? These are the value statements that are the things that you do, right? At Backroom, one of ours is celebrate humanity, right? It's a really big important one for us. And we have processes and systems that do that, whether they're reward systems or our monthly or Monday meetings that we have every single week to hear, what are you struggling with? We can help each other with it, right? We can enable that. And so we try to help our clients see what are the things that are important to you and are you actually doing them? Do your actions align with your values?

Jose Leal (18:53):

It sounds like you're saying something I truly believe in, which is values in of themselves don't change anything, but values that have processes tied to them and that are discussed and integrated into our workflow are what really makes the difference. Is that a fair way to say it?

Kara Redman (19:17):

Exactly. I mean, it's, you must act, words have very little value if you're not doing anything.

Jose Leal (19:24):

So, tell me a little bit about that. Like, when you are doing that analysis and you come up with the five pillars as you call them what's the relationship between those values and the team and the management and the staff? How do you go about making that that assessment, number one and two, who's involved in making that assessment? Is it a team effort or is it really something that you guys do on behalf of the organization?

Kara Redman (19:56):

It's a team effort. We usually tier them three into kind of three buckets. One are the top tier people who are actually making decisions, implementing on a leadership level. The second is people who are going to be directly impacted by that, but maybe aren't making decisions. And then the third is like anybody who's input we want. So we do a series of creative sessions, one-on-one interviews, surveys, right, to collect data so everybody has a voice. And then they can see their values reflected in that. I can say it Backroom, the way that we see how it's being implemented and assess it is leading first. It's always, everything is a bias toward action. And so for me as the founder, I have to go in and I have to be vulnerable and I have to ask for help or I have to see someone struggling and instead of going, well tomorrow and go, Hey, what can I take off of your plate?

Kara Redman (20:44):

Do you want to get on a quick session and go through it together? Right? So we model, it's very much like parenting. If you think about it, like you really go and model the behavior that you want, we don't have toxicity. We don't have people being rude, like we still struggle through things. We have healthy conflict, but our team steps out of roles to help if somebody's struggling, if someone got sick, we support each other. And I think that's a direct result of leadership, having a clear sense of who we are and that it's okay to be messy and screw up, we're going to screw up. And it's better to own a screw up and learn from it as a team than it is to go and try to hide and be sad about it, you know, on your own and create lies around it. So I think it's those types of I think it's those types of behaviors that shape great companies and get away from that very toxic fear-based blaming everybody. Nothing's getting done, everyone's keeping receipts. The there's no success, there's no win there, right? To talk about your win when nobody wins in that scenario, right? Everyone's afraid, everyone's hiding.

Jose Leal (21:48):

So, you're describing a lot of what's happening within your organization which is great. It sounds like you guys have really hit on a way of being that is a lot more human than the traditional organization. How do you go about instilling that in the leadership of your clients? Because that's a big transformation, that's a big gap. And I understand that, you know, changing your brand and starting to build that within your organization is one thing, but changing people's mindsets, changing the way people work is and think is a much bigger task. So how do you go about that process?

Kara Redman (22:35):

Well start by saying that the people who don't want to do hard work don't come to us. Right? There is a market for me to put a framework together and then I want it to be top down mandated, and we're not going to do anything with it. Those types of people tend to not be attracted to Backroom because very early on, even in our project intake forum and we're asking tough questions you must have goals. You have to be able to self-reflect, you have to be able to answer things like, what's important to you? What are you currently doing to make that true? Somebody who doesn't want to hit an outcome, somebody who doesn't want to win isn't going to answer that. They're going to get turned off, they're going to get bored, right? And so we talk a lot with clients very early in our sales cycle about our process and how heavily collaborative we are.

Kara Redman (23:25):

Whether it's coming up with a new name for a business or a new marketing strategy or internal change management. You have to, we all have to want to win more than that. We want to be right. And so folks that come in and just want us to validate things that they've already been saying to their employees and their employees are like, nobody, it's not going to work for us and everyone's leaving. We're not going to come in and validate that we're going to come in and transform your organization. And not everybody wants that. Most don't. From what we found. Right? So, I really think it comes down to our own brand, our own messaging, how we talk about ourselves and our, our intake process. Or people who have never and will never meet my team because they don't make it past me in the sales process. This is not a good fit and I'm not going to use my team's time. It's demoralizing, right? Because they're just never going to be a good fit for us. So, we have those gates up to make sure that we're attracting the people that want to do the work.

Jose Leal (24:20):

And so, from a standpoint of the clients saying, okay, I'm willing to do this work and you're going to guide me through modeling, is that the way you do it with them? Or is, are you know, doing workshops with them? Are you setting up systems? Your team goes in and sets up systems? How, give me a bit of an insight into this process because it seems to me that what you're describing sort of in this future of world future of workspace is what a lot of organizations are trying to do and not being very successful about and sounds like you are. So, I'd love to pry a little bit into that.

Kara Redman (25:11):

Yeah, that's a good question. I can certainly get more tactical. So, the process that we have typically I said is listening first. So our first session is always from the person who hired us. What are you trying to accomplish? What are your goals? What do you think that you are? What's your vision for the brand? Then we go and validate that, right? We find the holes, it's talking to people, talking to clients, customers looking in the market, reading views. We do a very deep discovery to figure out is what your vision and your brain is that true? Is it happening? Is it even possible? Right? And then we give them a reality check like, here's how you are hitting that already. Good job, great work, gold star here, op you have that you haven't captured yet, and here's something that you're saying you're doing that will never be possible and here's why.

Kara Redman (25:50):

We kind of give them that service menu, like, here are the things to work on. And then they have to come up really with the ideas with us, right? If there are gaps, like what are some things that we can do in your organization that are going to make this true? Or is it just really not that important and we need to scrap it from your values? We can bring teams in and have them do it. Be part of the conversation as well to say maybe it's a departmental thing. Maybe we can champ have heads that are championing this particular value. We make recommendations for things like, here's how you reward people who are exhibiting those types of values that you say are so important to you. Here's how you enable others to bubble up those who are doing those or some sort of a plan for bringing up people who are the antithesis, right?

Kara Redman (26:31):

Of our value structure. So sometimes I will say often when we implement plans like this, when we're talking about employer brand, it's more about weed out the people and the behaviors that representative of who and what you want to be more so than it is rewarding, right? And I've seen so many leaders who are afraid to fire one person who's bringing the whole team down because they just want to provide them with more opportunities and they're killing the vibe, right? They're killing it. I have a friend who I'm very close with, and she's very senior in her role, got this amazing job and one person is screaming at harassing, being terrible to the employees, including her that reported up to him. She reports that she reports that someone else reports, that someone else reports that nothing's done. We're going to give this guy another chance. Finally enough reports come in, he gets fired, then HR comes back to her and says, Hey, can you go ahead and give him a gift as a farewell for his last day? And I'm like, how of choose can you be that this person is killing your organization? One person. You have all these high performers and it's very commonplace. It happens a lot. So, a lot of times these programs are about, if somebody is not meeting this, if they are hitting your no note list, they got to go.

Jose Leal (27:43):

So how does that relate to the fact that you're talking about people being in environments that suit them because that obviously something is missing where that individual is trying to fit into that organization or maybe isn't trying so hard but isn't fitting into that organization. How do, you know, square that reality? Because that doesn't sound like very human what you've just described to me.

Kara Redman (28:13):

What do you mean when you say it doesn't sound very human?

Jose Leal (28:16):

Well, that the just fire that individual that that doesn't fit.

Kara Redman (28:21):

Yeah. If somebody is abusing people in the workplace, they must go, that person needs to be fired. So, I think that there's a base level of human behavior within a workplace that's acceptable and that's not right. And then there are things that we reward in terms of like we're going to reward people that bring other people into the mix when they're struggling. That's a reward. I'm not going to fire someone for not doing that. Right? You can continue to encourage them; you can model that behavior for them. If you have somebody who like, is that no list, you're the things that are absolutely non-negotiable, unacceptable within our organization, then absolutely that person has to go. And when you are very quick to react to somebody in a form of protecting your team, it's one of the best things you can do for morale.

Kara Redman (29:03):

Continuing to give people passes and continuing to give people chances for frankly just really behavior is going to kill us to your team's morale. You're going to lose trust. Those values suddenly don't matter anymore because now they're watching you flex for one person who can't behave. And I think that, to me it seems obvious, I think for a lot of the people that we work with, it seems obvious, but for a lot of organizations in Corporate America, it's not so clear like, hey, this person is actually performing on sales, but then they're going and screaming at the people below them and blaming like, I don't care about your sales anymore. But a lot of places do. Right? And so sometimes you do have to outline that for people.

Jose Leal (29:40):

Is there a way to, do you think there's a way to work with those folks? Or do you think that line in the sand is one that we want to keep?

Kara Redman (29:53):

Personally, if somebody is meeting someone on my team as a non-negotiable and they must go, I we are not, my team is not a sandbox or Guinea pigs for someone else to sort out their own problems. We are here to work. And if you cannot meet the baseline criteria for behavior, you're not going to stay.

Jose Leal (30:12):

We're over our 30 minutes, but I have so many more questions. You okay with another couple of questions? Awesome. So how do you square the fact that what I'm hearing is we want to build an environment, the company wants to build an environment that folks who are behaving will work within, and those who don't behave, then, you know, that's not acceptable. And the building of that environment seems to be very much based on the vision of the brand, not necessarily the vision of the individuals, not the needs of the individuals. Where does that, where does the visuals wanting to make an impact or wanting to have a purpose in in the work that they do? Where does that fit in?

Kara Redman (31:05):

That fits into the development of the brand. So, when we craft brands, we build it around people, internal and external. So, and the work that we do at backroom sometimes includes employer brand, but often doesn't. So, a lot of times we're working on an external facing brand, but even within that, we work, every project that we do starts with, we call a brand vision session where we understand what's important to people. Because what's important to leadership will be what's important to employees and will also be important to your customers. And so it really is about community building and finding the right people. And we've all heard like marketing to everyone's marketing no one, right? And this is really where brand-led organizations come in because you're starting to put values and systems that people can buy into in addition to the tactical problems that you solve for them. So as much as possible, any brand that we're building, we're pulling in those voices kind of in that tiered system that I talked about before to get the input of anybody who's going to be impacted in the team, anybody who has access to customers, anybody who works within the organization, even accounts receivable, accounts payable, so that everyone, when they see the brand outputs rollout, they see campaigns, they see changes happening in the organization, they see themselves reflected in that.

Jose Leal (32:15):

And so it sounds like in part what you're doing is making the brand something that everybody can associate with that everybody can feel that a sense of connection with the brand itself.

Kara Redman (32:31):

Yeah, I think beyond associating with it, I think something that they can believe in, right? We spend a lot of time at work and putting a lot of brain space and our souls into it. And I think it's something that brings meaning to people beyond just getting a paycheck.

Jose Leal (32:44):

And is that in your, the way that you guys do the work, that's not only the way that the employees connect to the organization, but the customers connect to the organization, the leadership connects to the organization. So, it sounds like that the brand itself for you is the hench pin of all of this, the linchpin I should say, of all bringing everything together. Is that a fair way to describe it?

Kara Redman (33:12):

Yeah, I think that's one way to describe it. Yeah, I think that I think just human needs really are the thing that bring it together and it's whether if we're doing something external for customers, we're thinking about what, how does our offering, how does our brand fit into an actual problem that we're solving? And the way that we work, how are we enabling the people who work here to solve that problem in the best way possible?

Jose Leal (33:34):

That's awesome. Kara, I could talk to you for another hour. I would be asking you lots and lots of questions. Thank you so much for your time today and for joining us. And I think we've got a guest already lined up for next week. Phil Johnson, CEO of MBL is going to be joining us next week. And Phil is from down the road in nearby Toronto in Mississauga where I used to live for 25 years. So I'm looking forward to talking to a fellow Canadian. And again, Kara, thank you so much and we'll talk to you soon.

Kara Redman (34:16):

Thanks for having me. Nice to see you.

Jose Leal (34:19):

Bye-Bye.