Local Business Owners Talk Leadership, Training Youth, Military Experience + More

What Is Leadership?

Adam: So how did you guys get into the
leadership business?

Fritz: Oh, man. See, this is that
zinger — it's like, why do you do what you do?

Adam: I guess maybe — what is
leadership?

Fritz: Was that supposed to be easier?
I think it's a good place to start. Leadership is anybody who has one person
they're leading. We just did a podcast on this, because when we speak, we're
always speaking to leaderships, and I think a lot of people think, well, I'm
not really a leader, I don't hold that position, I'm not management, I'm not a
supervisor. But in actuality, how are you with your peer group? How are you at
home? If you're a dad and you're at the bottom of the totem pole at work,
you're still a leader. It doesn't change. If you coach youth sports, you're
still a leader. The principles still apply.

Kim: I think it's so cool. As a young
adult, I had to be my own leader because I was constantly searching for what I
thought was leadership. I don't even know if that makes any sense, but it did
as a 14-year-old girl that didn't have any mentors.

Adam: I think it makes a lot of sense,
because the term gets thrown around so much. But if you don't have clear
examples of what exemplifies the characteristics, it can be quite confusing.

Kim: Well, how do you lead yourself?

Adam: The last week or so, when I was
thinking about this discussion, the only thing I realized is, as I look at my
life over the last 36 years, some of the best leaders never even consider
themselves leaders. And now it's this thing that professionals or people in
sports think they need to be. Oftentimes they're associating leadership
characteristics with athletes, with CEOs on TV, with highly polished people,
when in reality some of the best examples — it could be a foreman on a job site
that showed up on a Saturday to get something done. That was highly reflective
of their leadership ability, even though that's not what they thought they were
doing. It's just interesting how it's such an important but misunderstood and
potentially overused concept.

Leadership by Default in Sports

Fritz: You mentioned sports figures —
sports figures by default are put there because they have a stage. You are
under the microscope the minute you get signed, especially one that's maybe a
Heisman Trophy winner. You're in the spotlight, so now by default you're a
leader and you're going to be looked up to. And sometimes those people have no
leadership skills at all, because they've been taken care of and covered for
since they were six and could first put on the pads and run the field. People
saw talent, so they just kept them comfortable their whole life. Now they're
adults with these multi-million-dollar contracts on stage.

Kim's Military Background

Kim: Your first question was, what is
your definition of leadership? As we were rolling through that sport
conversation, for me, the leadership guidance came from being in the military.
Not that it was any different than having a coach when I played basketball,
because at one point I was actually tall on my team.

Fritz: I've never been told!

Kim: Then when I became a freshman, it
completely changed. I ended up having to be a guard instead of a forward, and
that didn't work out for me. But to go into the military — I think that's what
I was always looking for and searching for, what I thought in my mind was a
leader. My grandfather was a great leader to me, but he passed away when I was
17 and a half. So I didn't have him to fall back on to ask for mentorship, or
how do I navigate this.

Kim: I trusted the people that
outranked me, that had been in longer. A lot of times what it came down to was
that piece of somebody showing up, or nobody's watching me, but am I doing the
right thing? Am I doing the right thing no matter what? Integrity. At what
cost? And that's one of our core values in the Marine Corps — integrity.

Adam: And how long were you in the
Marine Corps?

Kim: Five years.

Adam: Within the context of
leadership, if you had to break down a milestone that you learned each year,
what are some of the major milestones over that period of time?

Kim: For me personally — oh, boy. How
about learning my own boundaries? I think I got myself in trouble more than I
should have, trying to stand my ground, trying to show my way of leading,
probably being more opinionated than I should have been. Because I grew up
really fast. I grew up without a lot of mentorship, period. It was very
volatile. I never went to the same school twice. I was bullied badly when I
started going to a downtown school. I had to ride the city bus. Especially when
you live in an area where there's heavy gang activity. And that's where I was
introduced to the Marine Corps — I had friends that were across the street at
the University of Arizona that saw me in trouble. They didn't know me, but they
were all in the military, all Marines, in the reserves, and they were all close
to my age, because I was 14 going on 19. I had to survive in those areas. That
was my first taste of what leadership looked like. They didn't have to know me,
but they fought for me.

Kim: There was a lot of time in the
Middle East. My first year was like learning how to walk. I didn't know where
my boundaries were, how far I could push. Because I graduated number one in
boot camp. I was number one. I had the best scores, wore the best uniform, I
was number one. And then I got to my duty station and I was nothing. I had to
start all over again. But I still had that attitude of, like, but I didn't —
you see my record? Like, don't you know who I am? When really, it doesn't mean
anything. It's how you walk it out. Knowing your position, just like sports —
knowing where you're at in that space. And I didn't for a long time.

Unlearning & Self-Awareness

Adam: When you had to unlearn some of
that mentality, was that through leaders around you that identified that and
said, hey, we've got to work on it? Was it just self-awareness? Was it a
combination of both? Because I think there are a lot of competitive, successful
people that, once they get into something new and maybe they're not immediately
successful, it's kind of a combination of having people that can help guide
them but also a self-awareness to know that there's things to work on. What did
that look like for you?

Kim: I think it was when I just kind
of ended up being on an island — I had a lot of people not wanting to be around
me. At 19 — wow, here's some vulnerability for you — at 19, I had already
gotten married and was expecting my first child, and I think where it all
changed for me was when I lost that child at five months. And I was 19. And
then I realized, I'm in control, and it's only up to me if I want to change how
the rest of my career goes. Because, love it or not, you are in it. You signed
a contract, so what are you going to do with it? It was really me looking at
myself and going, okay, how can I be better? Because a few months ago I was on
top of the world, and then I let other people start to get into my head and
dictate how I was going to behave.

Kim: In that moment of losing a baby,
losing a marriage, so young — I don't know where that came from, but the
ability to look at myself. And I had to do it again when I ended up homeless
with a child 18-plus years later. Because I have faith. Another failed marriage.
And like, okay, now it's an even deeper evaluation of what is going on. And
ultimately, here we are. Fast-forward, even after that, 13–14 years later, we
own a company that is going in and helping people to own that reality faster.
For us, it's about getting there faster, because I spent and wasted so much
time trying to figure it out through other people — what was going on with me —
when if I just had the tools, or somebody was just honest with me.

Successful vs. Struggling — Who Needs More Help?

Adam: When you guys are working with
people, do you see that — unsuccessful people, or successful people — need more
help? Because successful people that are still trying to get to the next level,
there's probably maybe an air of confidence at times where they're not aware of
some of the things that are happening around them — blind spots. But obviously
people that have been down on their luck, or think they're not as successful as
they could be, they need help as well. How do you see those dynamics for each situation?

Fritz: The key to all of that is,
everybody already has all the answers inside them, and it really depends on how
deep and how far back we have to go to help them discover what they already
know. It's this belief system that we're programmed with from before we're even
born. That starts with us — generational. And then it depends on how that
grows, depends on what the environment is, depends on all this input that
you're getting from zero till twelve, because that's the life we live today.
When people are more self-aware, they're like mediocre success, medium — those
people generally have some self-awareness. Then you get the people that might
have a little bit more ego than success, and they don't think they need the
help.

Fritz's Personal Journey

Fritz: I was there at one point. God,
when I was thrown into leadership, I didn't know what I was doing, and I
screwed it up bad. Because I didn't have any good leaders up until that point.
I didn't really start growing until I was 18 years old when I sobered up and
cleaned up, because prior to that, from 12 until then, I was on drugs and
alcohol. I wasn't living a life. Until I got sick and tired of being sick and
tired, that's when I sought out the information.

Adam: Seeking the information — what
did it look like at that point in time? Because seeking information now is
different.

Fritz: Oh, it's way easier now. I
didn't have Google back then. It was books. I read John C. Maxwell, Tony
Robbins. I really fell in love with Tony Robbins and everything that he
brought. He really saved my life and he didn't even know it. So many of the
principles and teachings that he had — the Jim Rohns of the world — that's
really where all of that began. Then I really started getting healthier at a
different level than what I was getting through other programs I was going
through to stay sober and clean. I wanted more and more, because I was almost
getting addicted to the feeling of feeling healthy and not so messed up. That's
really where all of that started.

Fritz: In my mid-20s, I always said,
I'm going to be like Tony. I'm going to do what he does. I want to coach people
like that. And that's where my leadership shifted too — that's when I became an
actual leader, not just a manager of people telling them what to do, because
that's what I thought you were supposed to do. And how many leaders out there
do that today?

Leadership vs. Management

Adam: I Googled leadership quotes, and
there's about a trillion results. But that's a very common distinction —
leadership versus management. As you bring that up, what are some of the
characteristics of each?

Fritz: A manager is really the
paperwork, the day-to-day operations. That's really what the category for
manager is. When you're talking leader, you're talking human capital. You're
talking about a responsibility — a moral responsibility — to the people that you
are leading. Because how you treat them and how you help them grow and become
the best person that they can be at work is so important, because they're going
home, and how they are at home is based on how you treated them all day long.
As leaders, we may not even realize that we're affecting another generation, if
not another generation beyond that, based on how we're treating the people that
are in front of us on a daily basis. Because I promise you, they spend more
time with you than they do at home with their spouse or their kids, but yet you
affect that entire family dynamic. If you don't understand that and you can't
get responsible for that, then you're affecting the people that are going to be
taking care of you.

Adam: So people need to be leaders and
managers at the same time.

Fritz: Yes. You have to be able to
hybrid them.

Kim: This is why we coach together.
It's Kim and Fritz, we are Rewired Dynamics, because we hear different things,
we process differently. We are male and female that are not romantically
involved — we have our own spouses. We have different personalities, a different
past. When we coach together, we hear different things, and there are different
questions we can pull out.

Kim: When you said management versus
leadership, we talk a lot about being proactive or reactive. Yes, you do have
to be one and the same at some points in your life between management and
leadership, but managers to me seem to be more reactive. A true leader within a
company feels more proactive. Leaders are always looking to be truly
innovative, to really think about their people. That, to me, is a healthy
leader. A leader that sits behind a desk and wants to manage everything that's
going on — that's where that reactive personality comes out, when it's about
me, how am I going to be protected? Instead of: okay, I'm solid, let's take
care of the people. Because without the people, we have nothing. If your
ecosystem is not in check and your culture is not in alignment, your entire
company is going to suffer, from the janitor to yourself.

Kim: You asked earlier about healthy
leadership — well, we're hyper-successful, but we're still seeking out good
coaches for us. Because that is not a thing. Stay humble and never stop
learning. You have breakthroughs, but you're never always there.

Different Timelines & Communication Code

Adam: One of the dynamics I see is
timelines that are out of sync. If you're saying that a leader needs to think
about the future, always be living in the future — I like to think about it as
reverse-engineering the future. Have a vision for what needs to happen,
reverse-engineer that into the present, then adjust as new information comes
up. But one of the challenges with that is, people live in different timelines.
Certain people within an organization — they're basically thinking the next 10
minutes, the next hour, the next day, the month, the quarter, the year. If
somebody's truly a leader, part of it is thinking into the future but also
being able to speak the language of these different timelines. I know there
have been situations where I'm trying to describe something that is likely
going to happen three years from now, and people assume that's going to be
implemented in the next three days. That awareness of toggling back and forth
between leadership and management and these different timelines — that's one of
the big challenges that I see.

Fritz: That's communication code. When
you're speaking timelines, I'm in my brain going “personalities.” If you don't
know your team and how each member of that team operates — because if you're
speaking to somebody who's very present-minded and doesn't have the capacity to
be future-oriented, there's going to be a serious disconnect.

Kim: You're speaking my language,
because I'm so futuristic that when I reverse-engineer, I might be lined up 20
years ahead. I struggle with that 20-to-now. But I always struggle with
learning and being able to speak what I mean first, because I'm just so out
there. People are like, what are you talking about? How are we going to do
this?

Adam: So you're asking me to get
through the day, at the same time you're asking me to understand what you're
describing five years from now.

Kim: Absolutely. So it really boils
down to understanding that team, and then the team understanding you as a
leader, and allowing them to do some support and some challenge. Say, well, how
are we going to do this? And what timeline are you talking about? Start asking
you the questions.

Adam: And the other dynamic, too —
based on the size of the company, you may not be specialized enough from a
personality and skill-set standpoint to have people that can only think about
the future, only think about the present. As we've grown, early on, you really
need people that can float back and forth between all of these things. But over
time, you can start to see there's more people that think a certain way, and
being aware of that is more and more necessary. In the beginning, it would have
just been much more clear that the team was out of sync, because people weren't
able to be fluid.

Kim: A lot of frustration comes in
that. In the beginning, when you're starting a company, it's a great idea to
have people like Fritz and me in the room or starting the company. But we also
know that we cannot do it without those present-minded, without the people that
are fighting truly for the care of people and processes. We need people in the
back that are very analytical, that want to help design, that don't want the
spotlight. We must have those people in order to create that alignment. And
when you understand how each other comes to the table, that becomes really fun
— because then you know when you need to not talk, because the quietest person
in the room is about to drop a bomb that's totally going to change how you go
out into the market.

Be the Same Person at Work and Home

Kim: You can have those six people in
the room, and you can put the innovators way out in right field and let them
run, as they keep bringing intel back to those people that are putting the
processes together, and then you can scale it back. Then you can move people
around. But having that alignment, that equality throughout the team, and being
able to speak to how we show up at work — it's very different. Our
personalities can be different, the way that we speak are different, and our
work is different, but we're always the same person. So how do we get that in
line? Because we hear that a lot: well, I'm really good at leaving work at work
and going home and being a different person. That's a problem. Nobody's talking
about that piece. You should not be a different person at work than you are at
home, because now you're living two different lives. And that's an issue.

Kim: We knew we were going to come
into these questions when we were speaking to companies, so we actually went
out and sought software and tools that would help us break down people's
personalities, understand who they are at the core.

Adam: Myers-Briggs?

Kim: Kind of. We have what's called
the Five Voices, which is a much simpler process. It really breaks it down.
It's really cool for us because we can help leaders understand their team at a
different level. That's when we talk about the alignment — that's really what
we're talking about, getting that communication code down.

Adam: What are the Five Voices?

Fritz: Oh, that's another podcast.
That's a lot of depth. But you have the Creative, you have the Pioneer, you
have the Connector, you have the Nurturer, and you have the Guardian. And then
you have all five of those voices in you — it's just what are the prominent
ones. There might be one or two that are prominent that drive your life.

Kim: For myself, I'm a Creative
Pioneer. So within that system, I am only 9% of the population. So if you were
a Guardian, who is 50% of the population, if he's telling you something in the
future, we're not going to be in the same —

Adam: You've already left the room.
You might be sitting here, but you're totally checked out.

Leadership at Every Stage

Adam: It's interesting, because it
seems like a lot of this stuff is generally reserved for medium to large
companies. It's almost like Maslow's hierarchy of needs — at a certain point
you can address leadership issues within an organization. But in reality, there's
probably things much earlier in the small business process where these things
need to be addressed. But when you're small, it's like: get revenue on the
books, get products built, design products, operate the business, focus on the
customer. Those are the fundamentals. You can't have a business unless you sell
something or bring revenue in and ship product out. But are you guys targeting
smaller companies to provide this type of service?

Kim: Great that you would ask it like
that. Every single entrepreneur, whether it's one person, whether it's the high
school student with the dream — every single one of us must have this. There is
no hierarchy of leadership, we just talked about that parenting circle. If you
are a college student and you're looking to start your own company, awesome —
you should know your own personality so that you can go out and actually have
these really good conversations and get there faster, in a healthy way. Because
when you start bringing people on, that is not the time for you to figure out,
I'm a Guardian and my futuristic thinkers are like, stop asking us so many
questions, because we haven't done anything yet. Because that's what a Guardian
will do — they become the interrogators of, why are we doing this? Where's our
money coming from? That's exhausting for somebody who is future-thinking. So
how are you going to even talk at the foundational level? Even as a brand-new
entrepreneur. Then it gets a lot more in-depth when you start going up the
chain and you become that CEO that's reached the top. Well, how did you get to
the top? You didn't get there alone. There's no such thing.

Kim: We're also totally out of the era
of leading people by, this is my title. It is about influence. You can be the
president and clearly it's not going to matter if there's no influence there.
Because you haven't walked it, you've not been transparent with me, you can't
be empathetic, you're not authentic — so I'm not buying it. It's a totally
different world now, and COVID completely slingshotted us into a place that we
were going — it just did it violently.

Vince Lombardi & The Fundamentals

Adam: A couple of the quotes I came
across — Vince Lombardi said, “Leaders aren't born, they're made, and they are
made just like anything else, through hard work. And that's the price we'll
have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.” I think it's hard to think your
way into leadership. You have to be presented with very hard challenges, and
that's kind of what forces you to be innovative, forces you to think outside
the box. Do you guys agree with that?

Fritz: You rise to the occasion. What
you do when you need it — you have to go back to the core. You've got to have
the basics. In another one of his quotes, he stood up in front of his team and
said, “This is a football.” And they mastered tackling, running, passing, and
blocking — the four fundamentals of football. So what are the fundamentals you,
as a person, need to master to be the ultimate leader? Because it does take
hard work. But if you're missing one of the basics, you're not going to get
there. That's really what we do — we come in and help identify the basics to
help you build a strong foundation and then fight, so that you can put that
work in, so that you can be made a great leader. Because no, they're not born.
I don't think talent is born either. That's something you have to work on, and
that's been proven in The Talent Code, the book.

Steve Jobs & Selling Ice Cream

Adam: Steve Jobs said, “If you want to
be liked by everybody, sell ice cream. Don't be a leader.” How do you guys
balance the fact that you're going to upset some people if you take a stand?

Fritz: It's interesting how people
will recoil when you confront them with the truth.

Kim: We are so conditioned. We are in
such a zombie state as a nation. We are so connected, we're disconnected, that
we think we already have the answers. We're very skeptical of anybody coming at
us that would think otherwise, because you can find — it's confirmation bias.
You can go online and find evidence for your stance wherever you want to look
for it. But what are you hiding behind?

Fritz: Exactly. What is it? There's a
root to everything, there's a root to every word. That's why we have
definitions with our worksheets. Because we're not just throwing things against
the wall and seeing if they work for you.

Kim: When we go to teaching and
cultivating people, we really want to make sure that we're doing it right. It's
not just Fritz and me at the table. And we are certainly not going to be liked
by everybody. If we get hate mail, we get excited, because we know we're doing
something right and we're pushing buttons in people that have an opinion.
Usually those are the ones that we need to speak to. But they'll never know
that we come with love, that we come to fight for you, because they don't give
it an opportunity. Because they're afraid.

Kim: We've been conditioned to believe
that everybody else around us, our circle of influence, has our best interest
in mind. And that's not true. If they've never pushed outside of that, if
they've never gone out to be active leaders and active listeners instead of
waiting to respond — which is what we're really good at as a society, we never
listen to anybody anymore. The communication gets broken down so far that now
you're just in a power position and I'm just going to listen to you. Yeah, you
can sell ice cream, everybody's going to love you. It's okay to be likable. But
you don't need to like me. I'm not addicted to that. I used to be, because I
didn't have friends. I was always a lone wolf. But when you realize that the
five people you hang around with — how often have we heard this? — you become
the average of. And when you really know that and see it, you start being real
selective about who you share your vision with.

Kim: Pay attention the next time you
share something — the listening audience — pay attention the next time you say
something that's a dream on your heart to somebody who doesn't know how to
dream anymore. And they're going to be like, oh, that's a ridiculous idea,
doesn't somebody already do that? There's a lot of unqualified opinions out
there. People's opinions of you are none of your business.

Staying Open-Minded & Humble

Adam: How do you stay open-minded to
all of that without being, I guess, paranoid about all the people you surround
yourself with? It could be family, friends, co-workers. There's obviously an
evaluation process that you're suggesting you go through continually. But how
do you balance that evaluation process with also trusting people to some
extent?

Fritz: For me, it's making sure that
the ego never comes out. It always stays in a box, because there's no place for
ego ever. I haven't been able to find one reason why that should come out. And
the second piece is just to remain humble. As long as I can do those two things
personally, it helps me stay open-minded. And it also helps that process of, I
like you, I understand what you're saying, but I don't agree with it. If you're
going to challenge me, then please bring me the proof.

Adam: Because there's so much talk out
there. From a business standpoint, from a productivity standpoint, in my mind
it's alignment on the customer, alignment on the product. You talk about
fundamentals — Vince Lombardi, “What is a football?” — well, what is a
business? The business has a customer base, they have a product or a service,
revenue is the lifeblood, you've got to have revenue flow in and product or
service flow out. If there are disputes, it really probably comes down to the
frequency. If people are disagreeing all the time, you can't ever get anything
done.

Fritz: That's support-challenge. We
have a tool called the Support-Challenge Matrix, and that's exactly where that
falls. Because there's healthy support and there's healthy challenge. Get in
front of a group of people and go, let's challenge one another. And they're
like, whoa. What do you naturally think of when you think of challenge?

Adam: Like in a work context? Does it
stop — it depends what kind of challenge it is. Is it a personnel challenge? Is
it a product challenge? Manufacturing challenge? Engineering challenge? It
really depends on the category.

Fritz: But where does our brain go?
Right to the negative. Right to the fight.

Adam: It depends on the
responsibility. An engineer, in some respects, their job is to think about the
negative. Like, if you're going to ship a $200,000 lighting package to the
Caribbean, you've got to think about what can go wrong. Is there dirty power on
site? What does the export process look like? There are people that have to
focus on that, it's just part of the job. But at the same time, it's also
making sure that's balanced with a lot of positivity. So I think it really
depends on the role and the person.

Fritz: High challenge is: let's have a
really hard conversation, and I'm going to support you through it. That's high
challenge. But going into it, people are like, whoa, I don't — low challenge is
going to be bad, high challenge is going to be scary. It could be, if you
didn't have a liberating leader amongst your ranks.

Staying Humble as Coaches

Kim: Back to being empathetic, being
super humble — we all go through struggle. You mentioned earlier, what if
somebody comes at us and they don't agree with what we — okay. We've had our
own partners come at us and say, that's not going to work. Okay, that's where
you're at in your career. Not to say that we didn't in the moment take offense,
but we got really curious about what are we missing? And that is being a
healthy leader.

Adam: I was just going to ask how you
guys stay humble and open-minded, and it's just —

Kim: We whiteboard everything, and we
go through the uncomfortable conversations of, that didn't work, or that did,
or how do we get a different response from somebody and have them go even
deeper so they can have a breakthrough faster. Because it's not about keeping
somebody in front of us for years. It's not necessarily about that. We want to
be an advisor, an advocate for you. We want to help — wherever your culture
goes, we would love to be there to support you. But to have you as an active
client forever and not get you a breakthrough? We shouldn't be in this
position. And no coach should be.

Kim: What we're finding is — oh, I'm
going to get in trouble — what we're finding is that they're really good
marketers, and they're playing on people's emotions. They're playing to get
them to spend money where they damn well know that they shouldn't be tapping
into, because they don't have the skills to do it. So be mindful. Do your
research. Have a conversation. The first talk that we have with people —
there's no cost to that. We want to know where you're at. This isn't about me
selling you something. I want to have a conversation with you, and we'll see
what kind of partnership we can have.

Sponsoring Students & Veterans

Kim: We are here to fight for people.
And we're seeing that a lot more with young entrepreneurs, these kids that are
— I'm getting interviewed a lot from high school kids that want to go into
business. We started thinking about, how do we help them? How do we get the
community involvement? WiLL is all about community involvement, getting more
entrepreneurs on a stage to be able to talk about what they do.

Kim: We've recently put together a
sponsorship program for companies within our own community that can sponsor a
student or a veteran to go through this training with us, so that they're not
worried about what you just said — when you're starting a company, what do you
have to worry about right off the bat? The football. How am I going to pay for
this? Well, those kids are our future. If we're not teaching them to be
innovative, to be humble leaders, they're not getting it in high school. I'm so
sorry for my educators, because educators go to college because they love
giving to their students, but they're put in a box that you must check this box
in order for that student to be successful. And they're doing them a
disservice.

Kim: So we're hoping that the
sponsorship piece will help companies reinvest into the students that are here,
because they want them to stay, they want them to go into manufacturing or
whatever else might be in the community. And you have people getting out of the
military for the second time, coming back to the community and going, who's
going to invest in me? Because I really feel like this is something that needs
to be built. So we help them through that process.

Fritz: It's not that we're coming in
and doing like a program with them. We're coaching for 12 months. If they want
to call us every day, they call us every day. We are going to literally fight
for them so that they can be the best entrepreneur and have the greatest
opportunity of success that they can have. Because most entrepreneurs — 78% of
them — it's a very lonely place. 74% of them suffer mental illness at some
point in that process. We don't want that. We want to be there, holding their
hand, guiding them, helping them go through some of the stuff we've went
through over the last two years. It hasn't been easy.

Kim: I quit this business a thousand
times in the last two years. Threw up my hands, was like, I'm done. It's really
hard. And it's hard until it's just not hard anymore. But you've got to keep
going. You're going through hell — keep going. Or if you get to that end point,
because maybe this just isn't where I want to be — because you don't even know
your personality. You've never asked a young entrepreneur, who are you? And how
do you show up for work? What do you really want to do? Because everybody's guided
them up to this point and directed them into what they thought they should be
doing. That all goes back to a belief system.

Kim: We're hoping that even after the
end of that year, if they don't want to be a creator of something, they will
know how to support the creator of something and be the best they can be for
that team.

Manufacturing & The World Around Us

Adam: I hope that within this area,
because this area is so strong in engineering, manufacturing, and construction
— I hope more people get excited and passionate about those types of businesses
and industries. A lot of people, when they think about starting a business, or
if they're young, it's, let's get in the tech space, or build an application.
They end up getting into very competitive spaces, whereas if you're in
manufacturing, there's been such an exit from manufacturing in the last 30 or
40 years — but this area is very strong in it. So I'm hoping a lot of those
young entrepreneurs get involved, get excited. Unfortunately, a lot of people
don't get excited about manufacturing — manufacturing facilities are oftentimes
dirty, there's a lot of routine and repetition. We very much try and change
that here. It doesn't matter if you're building a light fixture on the floor,
or welding a light pole, or on the sales side, the marketing side, the
engineering side — trying to get people excited about what's going on on the
manufacturing side. Because I think there's a real need there.

Adam: If you guys are ever talking to
somebody and they want some perspective on that, if they're interested in
manufacturing, I think it'd be very good to tip the scales in the manufacturing
direction for a lot of people. And one of the things I wanted to end on is: do
you guys think the issue of specialization within the economy has created
issues with people being too isolated or secluded from other types of
positions? What I mean by that is, appreciation and empathy and understanding
the different challenges that people have, regardless of where they are in an
organization. As the organization becomes more structured and
compartmentalized, people start to lose appreciation for what's going on. On
the manufacturing side, most people have never even stepped foot in a
manufacturing facility. I think there's a lot of empathy and appreciation
that's lost by people in manufacturing and engineering being so far removed
from the general population. Do you guys see that — the compartmentalization of
skill sets and roles?

Fritz: Yeah. There's definitely a lack
of that kind of skill set going on right now. I really wish that schools would
do more promotion of that two-year education over four-year education to go get
those hard skills.

Kim: As you were talking, I'm sitting
there going, all these people that are disconnected — all they have to do is
walk around and look. Because everything that they have is because of
manufacturing. Everything. There isn't a thing that they're going to do within
a few seconds of grabbing something that was manufactured.

Adam: And when I look at something,
I'm constantly thinking, okay, how was that made? Was it a casting process, an
injection molding process? Is there a microcontroller inside of it? Trying to
understand the way it works. But I didn't always think that way. So people can
start to shift that direction, but there has to be an emphasis in society. It
has to be cool. I think it was 40–50 years ago, but now there's this void of
interest. Just look around at the world around us — somebody had to make it.

Kim: It all goes back to conditioning.
We have created the easy button. So we're a product of our own environment. If
that's the case, we're looking to just get them involved, get them curious
about it. Have them come in and make a product. Then you get the brain working
in a different way, you start building different neurological pathways, you
start getting them outside of looking into a box and hoping one day they can be
like that. People have lost the art of working hard. The last thing you want to
have these kids thinking is that you have to live for somebody else's opinion.
That “like button” — you're not going to be an Instagram superstar, and even if
you are, you're still going to need us, because there's a lot of stuff going on
behind the scenes.

Adam: I think you're absolutely right.
The world is — there's a tangible world that exists that's more real than what
you see on the glowing rectangle in front of your face.

Wrap-Up

Adam: Well, thank you very much for
coming on. Anything else you guys want to run through?

Kim: I think we should have an episode
too on something else, because this feels like we just scratched the surface of
some really fun conversation. Now that you have a good foundation. Did we
answer your questions?

Adam: Yeah, I think so. I had a lot of
notes, but it's nice once the conversation got going to close the computer and
just talk. It's a really important topic. As we have grown from a few people to
about 60 people now, the dynamics change so much. Every five people that are
added, it changes. And I'm sure that doesn't stop. But these principles do
become more important over time, because people within an organization are a
little bit more disconnected than they were when it was a group of five people.
And yeah, if you guys are talking to young people in the area, anything we can
do to help — we do try to be a resource for the community, whether it's in
Lakeside Park giving away lighting for sports fields, or our charity every year
to raise money for the tech, or getting involved in Envision or YPF. Anything
that we can do to help, we're definitely here for it.

Kim: Awesome. That sounds great.
Thanks for having us.

Adam: Appreciate it. Nice meeting you
very much.