Episode 102: The Value of Core Strength with Jay Steinfeld

Announcer:
This is The WealthAbility® Show with Tom Wheelwright. Way more money, way less taxes.

Tom Wheelwright:

Welcome to The WealthAbility Show, where we’re always discovering how to make way more money and pay way less tax. This is Tom Wheelwright, your host, founder and CEO of WealthAbility.

So what makes a great business? It may not be what you think it is. So today, you’re going to discover with … I have an amazing guest, discover what exactly is it that is keeping you from being a great business or would allow you to actually change so that you can become a great business and I am so pleased to have with me Jay Steinfeld, who is the founder of Blinds.com. I think that by itself almost says everything, Jay. But in addition, a Longhorn, in addition, a recovering CPA. I mean all sorts of great things from Jay, but Jay, if you can tell us, if you would just tell us a little bit about about the Blinds.com story, just to start us out.

Jay Steinfeld:

Sure. Well first thank you for having me on your podcast. It’s an honor, I appreciate it. The short story is my wife and I had a little store called Laura’s Draperies. A mom and pop, she was the mom and I was the pop, and we went to people’s homes and helped them choose the proper drapery and blind. Well that was 1987. In 1993, I had heard something called the World Wide Web. I didn’t know what that was, and something called email. I had to find out what that was because I like to experiment, and so we just set up a website, the first one, lauras.com, and it was really just a brochure to see if we could look more progressive, to see if we can maybe set up some appointments, but there was no ecommerce. No ecommerce, no shopping cart. It was just a $1,500.00 experiment.

Well a couple years later, we see that there’s a company selling books online. Selling something online, Amazon, and thought, “Whoa. You can sell things online? That sounds cool. Maybe I’ll try to sell blinds.” And of course everybody said, “That is a harebrained idea, it’s stupid. People can’t see it, they can’t touch it, they can’t feel it. Oh, and you’re asking me to measure and install myself? No.” So there was no market for that at all, which was a perfect reason for me as a CPA to go into this market.

Tom Wheelwright:

[inaudible 00:02:52], why wouldn’t you?

Jay Steinfeld:

It made no sense at all. But as it turned out it made a lot of sense because over time we built it and we became the world’s most popular and trusted online source for blinds, by far number one, and 13 years later, we sold to Home Depot for a lot of money and I stayed on for six years on their online leadership team and still was the CEO of Blinds.com, and we integrated this technology into Home Depot’s 2,200 stores and into their website and now we’re doing even more than blinds. We’re doing countertops and sheds and decks, vanities, storm doors, all sorts of things. It’s like a dream come true, and then I stayed on for six years after selling in 2014 which is peculiar. You might want to wonder how that all happened. But it did, and I walked away last year and I’m now not retired but rewired.

Tom Wheelwright:

I like that. My dad used to say Jay that retirement is the … The word retire means to take out of service, and you’re like me, I hope I’m never taken out of service. I may just rewire myself, I like that, rewired, that’s a good way to put it. So here’s kind of the obvious question. You did something that Home Depot must have tried to do, and yet somehow, they couldn’t do it but here’s this recovering CPA and his wife, who figure out how to do this. What was it that you think made your company so successful and allowed you to do things that maybe the big guys couldn’t do?

Jay Steinfeld:

Well it wasn’t money. We didn’t have a lot of money, and we also didn’t have a lot of people. The key is that this is going to sound maybe odd to some people, but it was our core values. We had core values that said we were going to help people become better than what they ever believed possible. That meant our people. That meant our customers. That meant our CPAs, our attorneys, everybody within our sphere of influence, we were going to help them become the best that they can be. That was the purpose of our company. Not about selling blinds.

We had four pillars, four core values called the four E’s. The first one was to evolve continuously. That’s self-evident. You’ve got to get better, but you also have to help everybody around you get better. And when you have an organization that is not only ensuring that each person is wanting to get better and is taking steps to do so, and also helping everybody around them get better, you have almost this autonomous, automatic excellence, where a business is self-sharpening, and just gets better. And then we weren’t afraid to experiment, the second E, experiment without fear of failure. For the purpose of course of getting better, and the third was in order to know what to experiment, how to get better and what we should be getting better at, you needed data and how do you get data? You ask. So we wanted people to express themselves, express, the third E, and have a voice and not be afraid of speaking up.

So when you’ve got people who says, “You know what? There’s a better way to do it,” or, “This priority that you think Jay is so great, maybe I’ve got a better idea.” And of course, I didn’t do this just to get buy-in. I got this because I actually wanted to get the data. Now when we got the data and we started doing all these things, there would be buy-in because it was the right thing to do.

Okay, so now you’ve got everybody evolving and experimenting and expressing themselves. Now we get to the fourth E, enjoyment. Enjoy the ride. For us, being able to do all these things that nobody else thought was possible. So we had these few people doing so much because that’s just what we did. That was in our DNA. All we were going to do was keep evolving and that applied to the technology that we were able to talk to customers, listen to customers, be intimate with customers, and just keep working really hard because for us, working hard and being consequential and significant was fun. It was as simple as that. We liked to have fun and we liked to do things that people didn’t think were even possible.

Tom Wheelwright:

So you and I, we were talking about this before we started is that we share a real interest in core values and a passion about core values. I believe with every client I talk to, I look at their core values. I’m going, “Okay, what are your core values and let’s talk about your core values,” and when I see people that … Partners that don’t fit, partners that aren’t having good success because they don’t share those core values, right? You can say the core values are whatever you want, but if you don’t believe in those core values, it’s not going to work for you.

But I find it interesting, I’m looking at your core values and I’m thinking about WealthAbility’s core values and our core values are pretty easy. They’re own it, honor it, have fun with it, and break it, and they’re actually not that different from yours because the break it is your experimentation. Let’s make sure that we need to experiment with it, we need to break it and make it better because if you’re not breaking it, if you’re not failing, you’re not improving. I mean to me, that’s always been one of my mantras in life. If you’re not failing, you’re not trying, and then you talk about have fun, enjoyment, right? So we have fun with it and so let me ask you this question though.

So we’re both big believers in core values. I actually think it should drive everything in your business, but why do you think that core values had such an impact on your growth? Not just your core values, but why is it that you had these core values that were so important? How do you think that drove your growth and your innovation and why you could do things that other people weren’t doing?

Jay Steinfeld:

Well because when we talk about core values or when I talk about core values, it’s not whether people can recite them or not. It’s whether they do them. Our core values, the core values that we had were my personal core values. They are my personal core values. This is what I do. I wake up and I experiment and I evolve and I help people around me evolve and I speak up for sure and I want other people to speak up. And I like to have fun. I like to amuse myself. So that’s just what I am, and it applied to the company. These were not aspirational goals that I said I’ve read this in a book and this is who I want us to be.

Tom Wheelwright:

Very, very important. Not to be aspirational. Just be who you are.

Jay Steinfeld:

So it’s the behavior. We did it because that’s what we do. That is what we do, and when we hire people, we didn’t bring them in because they have the right skill and then say, “These are our core values. This is how we want you to be.” We were very deliberate on who we hired. We wanted to make sure people already experimented in their lives. That people already were willing to take chances.

Tom Wheelwright:

Let me ask you a question about that, Jay. To go maybe even a step further, how much do you think your core values played in who you attracted to your business, either as customers, employees or vendors?

Jay Steinfeld:

Huge. Absolutely huge. We had a giant vision, the 2020 vision, and when people came to interview, we would talk about that. And everybody knew that we were destined to do something that was different than what they were ever doing before. And they wanted to come to a company where they could be significant. Because really Tom, if you want to do something consequential, you first have to help people become consequential. They have to feel consequential. They have to feel significant. And we were able to attract people from Chevron and Exxon and all the big oil companies that are in Houston for less money because they wanted to be part of something where they felt significant and they were doing consequential work.

Tom Wheelwright:

You know clearly –

Jay Steinfeld:

And we retained them. Who would want to leave that? If they’re getting better as people, they’re becoming better and they’re doing this great work, why would they leave? Our turnover rate was only 8%. 8%.

Tom Wheelwright:

Hey, if you like financial education the way I do, you’re going to love Buck Joffrey’s podcast. Buck’s a friend of mine, he’s a client of mine, he’s a former board-certified surgeon, and he’s turned into a real estate professional. So he has this podcast that is geared towards high paid professionals. That’s who he’s geared towards. So if you’re a high paid professional and you’re going, “Look, I’d like to do something different with my money than what I’m doing. I’d like to get financially educated. I’d like to take control of my money and my life and my taxes,” I would love to recommend Buck Joffrey’s podcast, which is called Wealth Formula Podcast with Buck Joffrey. I hope you join Buck on this adventure of a lifetime.

You know what’s interesting to me is that you and I are the same generation and we get a lot of pushback about the hey boomer and you guys and the millennials and the Gen Zers, they say, “Well we want to … What’s important to us is that we want to do something consequential.” What you and I are saying is, “Yeah, so do we.” Right? So this isn’t really generational, and I always tell people, if you make it about money, you made a huge mistake, and frankly, you shouldn’t be in business. But it’s got to be about, it’s got to be about how are you serving. What are you doing to make the world better and when you do that and it’s bigger than yourself, and you have a vision for what that can become, it makes it really easy. I mean I just find it really easy to attract people into that circle when … Because if you believe it and you’re passionate about it, I mean you’re going to attract those people who can show that passion. Is that fair?

Jay Steinfeld:

100%. I will make one nuanced difference in terms of the way I think about it. I don’t have a passion about blinds. I don’t feel like blinds are changing the world. I mean we’re not creating vaccines. We’re not curing cancer. We’re just doing blinds. It’s not that big of a deal. But what our passion was was for people. For helping people become the best they can be. And that was our passion. It didn’t matter if I was selling blinds or if I was selling igloos. It didn’t matter.

Tom Wheelwright:

Yeah, so let me ask you this question because that’s really … That’s very interesting. I mean that’s fascinating to me. So you’re selling blinds which is about as … Almost as boring as what I do, which is sell tax services, right? So almost as boring, and the question I’ve got for you, so you’ve got these amazing improving the world, how do you translate that, how did you translate that to your delivery of your product?

Jay Steinfeld:

Well, it’s not just the delivery of product. It’s everything. Everything in your company can always be better. You can never be complacent about anything. There is no stagnation allowed, and that means the way we deliver our product, the way we merchandise our product, the way we price our product, the way we portray our product, everything about our product, the quality of the product, how quickly we get it to them. I mean I could go on. You just name anything there is in a business and it applies to evolving that process, that organizational structure, that compensation plan, the way you advertise, the way you hire, everything. So there’s no difference to us. It’s about looking at the entire business and seeing mainly what customers really need and not necessarily what they say they need, they want, but what they really need, and making sure that you are focused, focused on making that customer experience exactly the best it can be. Knowing it can never be as good as it can always be. It’s just you can always get something better. I will never be as good as I can be. Ever. And if there is, that means I’ve just stopped thinking. That means I’m not listening because a lot of other people will tell me that there are things that I can improve on, my wife for one.

So don’t ever think that you’ve got it figured out. Because you never have it figured out, and you never have enough information. But I think knowing that you don’t have enough information is sometimes enough because that will at least get you to start, and a lot of people get freaked out about not even starting because they don’t think they’ve got the right answer from the beginning. Just a step. Pick a step.

Tom Wheelwright:

Absolutely. One of the best things I learned at the University of Texas, where we both went to school, from one of my tax professors was that the great thing about our profession is the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. So it’s actually one of those [inaudible 00:16:56], it’s a little like golf, right? You’re never going to be perfect at this because there’s always something you can know, do or improve.

But let me ask you this question. You talked about the customer experience and it’s pretty easy to see why somebody would want to be an employee at Blinds.com. How did you translate that to the customer, because again, the customer’s buying a blind, right? I mean it’s like in my profession, the customer’s buying a tax return, I mean come on, it’s a tax return. It’s a commodity, just like a tax return, it’s a commodity. And so how did you translate that enthusiasm, the values, improving, all of that kind of stuff into the customer experience?

Jay Steinfeld:

Okay, that’s great. There are several ways we did that, Tom. One online, we’re constantly looking at removing friction, providing better pictures, better videos. Anything that makes it easier for a customer to be able to do it with the least amount of friction. You always, that’s like step one, remove friction from the buying process.

Second, how do you train people on the phone to care? Well, if already the goal within the organization is to help people become better than they ever believed possible, that also includes your customer. So if that is really ingrained in you, your goal is to make sure the customer buys the right product, not just any product, and we compensated people for just not making a sale, but making the right sale. We didn’t just put quantitative metrics into our compensation program. If you sold a product and it wasn’t the right product, because we listened to calls, we had a QA department who would listen in on calls, not all, at random, and the compensation program was based in part on whether they actually were friendly and actually asked the right questions, to be able to find out what the best solution was for each and every customer, so that when that customer moves through buying, yes, it was a commodity, but the process in how they buy it, that was not a commodity.

Tom Wheelwright:

All right, so number one is remove friction. Number two is get people to actually care on the phone. Do you have a number three?

Jay Steinfeld:

Yep. We’ll compensate them so that their behavior aligns with caring, and you have to spend a lot of time and money training them, and if you have a culture where they want to stay, then you can afford to pay more for training because you’re not thinking, “Well, I’m just going to bring anybody in here because I know they’re going to leave.” With an 8% turnover rate, you can afford to invest in every person.

Tom Wheelwright:

That’s a good point. That’s a really good point. So let’s fast forward a little bit. So you are an early adopter of a really very futuristic technology that nowadays we take for granted, right?

Jay Steinfeld:

Yep.

Tom Wheelwright:

Okay, and we have some new technologies that are in the same place as where the web was in 1993 and that would be the blockchain. When I think of blockchain and AI technologies, two different technologies but one actually enhancing the other, AI enhancing the blockchain technology. And I always think of blockchain, I’m an accountant, right? So I think of blockchain as triple entry accounting, which is kind of what it is, right? Because it’s got the two entries plus it’s got a verification entry, which is what the miners do in for example bitcoin. So the question is … All right, so you went from brick and mortar to … Interestingly enough, if I understand right, you went from brick and mortar to online back to a combination of online and brick and mortar, right? [inaudible 00:21:10]

Jay Steinfeld:

Yes. We had stores, and I wanted to sell the store and did, and said, “I will never have another retail store again,” and then we ended up with 2,200 stores.

Tom Wheelwright:

And now we’ve had COVID for two years, and we’ve had people away from the office. Because of technology, we’ve actually been able to do that. I mean 50 years ago, we couldn’t have done that, right?

Jay Steinfeld:

That’s correct.

Tom Wheelwright:

You would just have been out of business. You couldn’t have had people work from home. My CPA firm, I run a small CPA firm besides our WealthAbility Network, we actually have almost no clients locally and we never see our clients. [inaudible 00:21:52] our clients, we have had clients, virtual, but we have had clients all over the country for 15 years. I mean we’ve always done everything online from a client service standpoint. Now what we have is we have this odd piece of, “Okay now, at some point do the employees come back?” Because they’re still afraid, and to a large extent, people are still afraid of coming back and working side by side. We got a new variant, et cetera, et cetera. So here’s the question. So how do you … Actually I’ve got a bunch of questions but I’m going to stick with two, okay?

Jay Steinfeld:

All right.

Tom Wheelwright:

The first one is how do you adapt to that change in technology? You weren’t an expert in the web. What is it that allowed you to adapt to technology, knowing that you were … I mean granted, you wanted to experiment and evolve. Is that really what allowed you to say, “You know what, it doesn’t matter what happens. We’re going to be fine.”

Jay Steinfeld:

Yes. It’s almost like having an all-weather portfolio. We’re diversified and we’re just saying we are going to find the right solution, and we’re going to experiment every day and maybe multiple times during the day, and we’re not going to try to predict the economy or what the market is going to do to use that analogy again. We’re not going to try to determine what the future is necessarily going to be, although of course, as the CEO, you’re always looking five, ten, fifteen years in the future. But also taking dead aim on today as to make sure you’re doing what needs to be done today, thinking of the end. And you are able to adapt because that’s just what you’re doing every single day, and everything in the company is doing it.

Tom Wheelwright:

You’ve actually made adapting part of the company culture.

Jay Steinfeld:

Yes. That’s exactly the point. It wasn’t that we had to adapt, we adapted. That was what we did.

Tom Wheelwright:

That’s what you did.

Jay Steinfeld:

That is what we did.

Tom Wheelwright:

That is the core of what you were doing.

Jay Steinfeld:

That was actually the key core value, and having fun doing it. It wasn’t that we were able to deal with the ambiguity. We loved it. We loved to explore. We loved to go into the unknown, and we didn’t even like knowing exactly what it was going to be. We have these two giant test tubes in the office, like five foot tall, and in one test tube are experiments that we did that did not work. It’s full of marbles. And the other one is the experiments that did work. It has about 10, 15% marbles in it, and they’re right on display, so people can say. When you experiment, most of the time, it’s not going to work, and we’re proud of that. Look at all these experiments that we did, and yeah, they didn’t work, but we didn’t expect them to work. Because if you expect them to work, they’re not experiments. They’re not.

Tom Wheelwright:

True.

Jay Steinfeld:

The only time you’re experimenting is when most of them are not working. That’s the only way you’re really going to find something that’s great.

Tom Wheelwright:

So let me ask you the next question. So as you can see I’m taking notes here.

Jay Steinfeld:

Oh thank you.

Tom Wheelwright:

I love it when I’ve got a guest, I’m taking notes as fast as I can. But my final question is so how important is it to you? Now again, knowing that we are a different generation than certainly any of my employees. I mean I don’t have any … I have no baby boomer employees. I am the oldest employee in my company by at least 20 years.

Jay Steinfeld:

Oh wow.

Tom Wheelwright:

I prefer to be around young, energetic people. That’s kind of my nature. My question is how important is it going to be to bring people back into the office and how much do they need to be back in the office in order to generate that culture that you’re talking about that made you so successful?

Jay Steinfeld:

That is the question of the day. That is such a good question. I just wrote an article about it for Inc Magazine, I write for Inc. I think that when you’re bringing people into the office, they have to be in the office. When you are hiring them, because they’re not going to understand the culture being away.

Tom Wheelwright:

Of course.

Jay Steinfeld:

I mean you say of course, but maybe that’s a hey boomer kind of of course. Because a lot of people say, “No. You can get that culture,” and there are companies, there are some technology companies that are doing great and it’s a distributed workforce, it’s not even hybrid. They’re just all everywhere, and they’re doing great. But that’s the exception. If you really want people to understand what the behaviors are, they’ve got to see people. If you want for people to make connections within the office, they have to actually be with them, and if you’re walking through and you don’t even know who these people are in that office, and you say, “Wow, they’re having fun. They’re doing something important. Look at that prioritization list that they have on their whiteboard. Look at how they’re determining prioritization.” Or you walk down the hall and you walk into a room and you see a whiteboard and you see that they’ve just mapped out the customer journey, and you say, “Wow, they’re really thinking about that journey. That’s really awesome.” That’s experimentation, that’s understanding what the behaviors are, not what we say we’re going to do, and I think it’s really important.

Having said that though, I will say that we’ve had a distributed workforce, a hybrid workforce, for almost 15 years. I work from home for probably a third of the day. Why couldn’t other people, and we did. Our entire call center, which we call the customer engagement center, took their laptops home every day so that if they were not able to come in, they could work from home every single time, and we would test it, and people would be able to work from home all the time, and if their numbers weren’t good, they’d have to come back in.

Tom Wheelwright:

So how often, just on average and I don’t know if there is an average, if this is even a fair question. How many days a week or how often do you think you need people in the office?

Jay Steinfeld:

Well first, I don’t think I could have built the company and done the things that we did and develop the culture unless virtually everybody was in the office. I know that’s going to be controversial, but I really felt like we needed to be there. There could be other leaders who can do it. I couldn’t. I know I couldn’t do it.

So I think it really depends on the kind of company that you have, where your customers are based, whether you’re doing things that are more rote and repetitive or whether you’re doing things that require energy and this holistic, synergistic view of improving every second. Because if that’s not your core, then maybe you don’t need to be in the office as much.

Tom Wheelwright:

So let me follow up. So PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the largest CPA firms in the world, announced a month ago that none of their people need to come into the office, they can work from anywhere in the country. 55,000 employees. So how do you think that’s going to work?

Jay Steinfeld:

I actually don’t think it’s going to work. I believe … This is my theory, it’s just a theory. I think if you don’t do it right now, you’re going to lose a lot of people. Because people can move. It’s easy to move to a different job because of technology and because so many employers are saying, “If I don’t do this, I’m going to lose all my people.”

Tom Wheelwright:

Right.

Jay Steinfeld:

So right now, I think you almost have to do it. But I think it’s going to come back around and people are going to go, “You know, we’ve just lost so much. Why aren’t we evolving? Why aren’t we doing the things that we used to be able to do?” Well it’s because nobody knows who everyone is.

Tom Wheelwright:

Yeah, let me follow up with that. So I remember, so back in 2007, I remember this quite well. This was right before the crash, right? We had an employment market very much like today, where the employees had a lot of clout, and there were very few employees, you were fighting for employees, they were getting higher pay. This is just when they were starting to stay, “Well we need more flexibility. We want a work-life balance. We want more money, but we want a work-life balance,” right? So I never quite understood how that’s supposed to work. “Okay, we want more money.” [inaudible 00:30:50] sorry but he needs a work-life balance, so therefore, you’re going to pay more and get less. Haven’t figured that one out yet, but …

But what I found was, here’s what we found. We actually found that the more we bent over backwards for the employees and didn’t stick to who we were, the less happy the employees were. So in other words, we lost actually … We came up with all these new things and these new benefits and all this kind of stuff, and literally, a third of our employees left. A third of our employees left. When we got to the point where we knew exactly who we are, focused on our core values, and we go, “Look, this is the way we do it,” nobody left.

So I’m just curious as to what your thoughts are on that. Is that something that’s just happened to be with us or do you think that you actually need to stick with who you are and make that decision and just stick with it, even if you get into this market like we have right now where it’s just really hard to find employees.

Jay Steinfeld:

I think the people who don’t stick to who they are don’t know who they are and why would you expect employees to know who you are? Why would you expect employees to be loyal, when you don’t yourself even know who you are?

Tom Wheelwright:

And you’re not being loyal to yourself.

Jay Steinfeld:

Exactly.

Tom Wheelwright:

Got it. I like that.

Jay Steinfeld:

When we sold to Home Depot, you’ve got this giant at the time $80 billion, now they’re like $130, 140 billion, somewhere in there, giant 450,000 people. You would think that our core values would change because now we were part of this big mothership. No. We stayed exactly who we were, and Home Depot was smart enough to say, “God, they’re just doing all this great stuff. Let’s leave them alone.” That was a [inaudible 00:32:42].

Tom Wheelwright:

Jay, I’ll tell you what. Jay, I think you were very fortunate. I think you sold your business to one of the great companies in the world. I am a huge fan of Home Depot. I’m not a big do it yourselfer but enough so that I need those kinds of tools and that kind of stuff. And of course Home Depot has a major and I won’t mention their name but they have a major competitor that’s closer to me, but I go in that major competitor and I’m going, “You know what? They don’t even care I’m here. Their stuff isn’t organized in a way I understand it.” So I will drive the extra two miles, and granted that’s not a lot, but I’ll drive the extra two miles every day of the week and I would pay more money so that I could shop at Home Depot. So I’m happy to promote Home Depot, I’m a huge Home Depot fan, because they treat me better. Finding a person to help you at Home Depot is easy. Finding a person to help you at one of these other big box hardware stores is really hard.

Jay Steinfeld:

Yeah. [inaudible 00:33:44].

Tom Wheelwright:

I think you are so … It sounds to me like part of what you did though was you aligned … You sold to somebody who had similar core values.

Jay Steinfeld:

Yes. They said that, one of the things they said when they … They didn’t tell me, of course they were not going to show their cards, but after they came the first time and they went back and after the transaction, one of the things they loved is they said, “Wow. These guys are just passionate about their core values, just the way we are. And this is not going to be one of these things where there’s going to be this tension of how we operate and how they operate. This is going to work.” And they felt, the only thing they thought is, “Jay loves his company so much he’ll never sell it.” That was a good thing too because that means they’d have to pay a little more money.

Tom Wheelwright:

Exactly, exactly.

Jay Steinfeld:

To wrestle it away from me.

Tom Wheelwright:

So I lied. I didn’t have two more questions, I have three more. So I have one last question for you. Because this is something that I’ve heard about you and I think it is masterful and that is that you ran your company like a public company, even when you were a small company. In other words, as I understand it, you had outside accountants, you had an audit done when you didn’t need to have that expense of an audit. Why did you do that and what was the result?

Jay Steinfeld:

We wanted to run a professional company. Having fun doesn’t mean not being serious. You can be serious about the metrics, you can be serious about accountability, and you can be serious about governance. We wanted to have our audit and we were doing audits way before we needed to. We didn’t even need to do an audit for the bank.

Tom Wheelwright:

Oh I’m sure.

Jay Steinfeld:

Because we weren’t even borrowing money. We did it because we knew one day we would sell the company, and we wanted the buyer to say, “These guys have had audited financial statements for 10 years before they even needed it. I’m feeling pretty good about them.” We hired Ernst & Young, we hired Silicon Valley Bank. We had a legitimate board with independent, outside board members, and that’s pretty scary for a CEO who doesn’t have control of their company who could then be disrupted himself or herself. But we wanted to make sure that we had a legitimate board with the governance that said, “Your meetings are being run well. Your internal controls were good.” I mean we didn’t do Sarbanes-Oxley, we didn’t do things like that. I mean there are things that are on a public board that we didn’t do.

Tom Wheelwright:

Right. You didn’t have to do them and they didn’t add value, but what I keep hearing from you Jay and let’s end on this is accountability. When you have a board of directors, when you have outside auditors, all of that says accountability to me. Why would … Not just for being ready to sell, but why internally, how do you think that helped you grow to have that kind of accountability?

Jay Steinfeld:

Well, when you’re precise, you can grow. When everyone in the company knows that everything is being measured and being measured properly and that you’re hiring really strong CPAs and strong bankers, it just has got this halo effect that yeah, Jay is having fun and he’s got these concepts and he’s kind of crazy, but when it comes to the business side of it, he’s very serious about it, and that we are going to be honest and we’re going to be accountable to our stockholders and that precision and honesty and trust, which are obviously the central part to any business, matter, and we’re going to measure that trust. We’re going to measure that accountability, and we’re going to make sure if there are any deviations that we find out about it and we correct it. Because we want to grow and we want to have a really strong company, and these things are put into a company not to sell it but to have a good company, and I want a good company, and it’s much more fun when you don’t have to worry about negativity. You just do the right thing and everything takes care of itself.

Tom Wheelwright:

I love it, and of course obviously, then that adds transparency. I always tell people if you want to be big, you have to behave like you’re big. You have to start by who are you first before you can actually be that person or that company. So Jay, love it. Lead From the Core is the book. Please, please, please get it. If you think about it, it is the core. It really is the heart of your business, it’s the heart and the soul of who you are, and it will completely change your life when you live by those principles because you’re living true to yourself, your employees are true to themselves, your customers are true to themselves. Everybody is true to those core values and to me, it just makes life so much better. So Jay, outside of reading your book, how can we learn more about what you’re doing?

Jay Steinfeld:

Well, I’m all over LinkedIn, so connect with me on LinkedIn but I also have a website, jaysteinfeld.com. You can learn more about me, about my speaking engagements, all the things that I do, about the core values, a lot more on there, and of course the book is probably the best way to understand Lead From the Core: The 4 Principles for Profit and Prosperity.

Tom Wheelwright:

That’s awesome. Congratulations. Thanks so much for being with us, Jay, and just remember, when you really do get that focus on who you are, you know who you are, your employees know who you are, your customers know who you are, you focus on those core values, you’re always going to make way more money and pay way less taxes. We’ll see you next time.

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