Ep. 3: Ad Results Media CMO Talks about Creating a Values-Driven Company
In this episode, Darren Reinke chats with Kurt Kaufer, partner and Chief Marketing Officer of Ad Results Media. Kurt shares his insights on the importance of values-centric leadership, creating values-centric organization, using your company as a medium to champion your personal values, the source of values, using values to filter clients, and the growth of Ad Results Media.
Ad Results Media is the leading audio and podcasting marketing agency that works with Fortune 500 and unicorn companies
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SHOW NOTES
The Origin of Brown Bear Digital, which eventually became Ad Results Media [1:00]
Establishing their Values Pillars before He Launched His Firm[4:52]
Making the Connection Between Values and Business [7:12]
Using Values to Filter Clients [9:20]
Communicating Values Externally to Customers [10:08]
Living Up to Your Values [12:40]
How Authenticity Leads to Happiness and Success [14:58]
The Importance of Why [17:10]
The Creation of Brand Pillars and Integrating Them into the Culture [18:00]
Challenges of Growing and Scaling while Staying True to Your Values [22:36]
How Values Shifted Over Time [27:38]
How Values Helped Them Deal with Challenging Times [31:05]
Advice for Leaders in Infusing Values into Their Teams [38:35]
SHOW LINKS
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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Darren: Today's guest is Kurt Kaufer. Kurt is a partner and Chief Marketing Officer of Ad Results Media, the world's leading audio and podcast media agency, Kurt, thanks for coming on the show.
Kurt: Hey, Darren, great to be here. Thanks for having me.
HOW BROWN BEAR DIGITAL STARTED
Darren: I always love a good origin story; can you take me back to the founding of your firm Brown Bear Digital that eventually merged to become Adults Results Media?
Kurt: Yes, that story probably goes back to, well, before the actual founding of the firm, Brown Bear back into, post-college and sort of what I was doing with my career out of college, I was working in finance, finance was an industry in sort of a job path, and I kind of fell into just based on the necessity of paying college loans and trying to just get work, but it wasn't necessarily my passion or something that I connected with. And I ended up being in finance for about seven or eight years.
And during that time, what I started to realize was that I wasn't passionate about what I was doing, there were other areas, where I felt like, I can make a bigger impact both on my happiness and on potential others, in a way that felt sort of again, deeper and more meaningful, just in terms of like, what my journey may be in my career in my life. Fast forward I ended up getting into digital marketing, not that that was, putting me on this path towards righteousness or anything like that. But I kind of saw a creative path for myself, and digital marketing was great because I had sort of a finance analytics background.
And it was, during sort of my time working on the client-side and digital media at ProFlowers. And Shari's Berries, where I started to understand that I didn't think necessarily, my path was sort of a corporate one, whether it be in finance, or whether it be in digital media, working on the client-side organization, I felt my path was bigger or different, right? In terms of, how could I take learnings from my life or instinctual sort of values that may have had and sort of spreading them across a wider group of people to try and impact them and in that way, I would find sort of success and happiness and joy in my career. Right.
WHY KURT AND HIS PARTNERS CREATED BROWN BEAR DIGITAL
So, the genesis of the agency, in the firm, Brown Bear Digital was sort of an amalgamation of, me wanting to have a vehicle to sort of get my message out there, or to satiate this desire to sort of spread values, just generally seeing a market opportunity, right, like I was happy to get into digital marketing, I saw a real opportunity with, in addition to my business partners around bear in sort of podcasting and performance media, so the two worlds kind of just sort of combined, where I saw the opportunity for creating a business where that could be successful, but also, from an interpersonal point of view, use that business as a medium or a vehicle to bring my values out. Brown Bear, the name itself originated, it was named after my son's children's book, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
And part of that was sort of centering ourselves in terms of what do we want this organization to stand for? Values being sort of, at the top of that, right, and family values, maybe being one or sort of coming from that point of view of would my family be proud of me if I made this decision or that decision or in this approach, or if I took a risk or not took a risk? So, Brown Bear was a constant reminder, sort of that Genesis and those values that we wanted to deploy after we launched Brown Bear.
ESTABLISHING VALUES PILLARS BEFORE LAUNCHING A COMPANY
Darren: You impressed me several years ago, when we sat down for lunch, and you talked about establishing those value pillars, even before you had a company, I thought it was really impressive. And because it's so important for leaders to have their values to leadership teams having their values and of course, organizational values. Can you talk through that a bit in terms of what those values were and how you integrate that into your early firm?
Kurt: Yes, the values themselves probably came from a lot of life and work experiences, right things that resonated with me and at certain points in my life or within my job or career within finance, and obviously with digital marketing, but some of them were just sort of instinctual to and as I was working, whether it's in finance, or again at ProFlowers where I wasn't finding joy, what I did find joy in was sort of putting ideas and these values down on paper, right, it offered sort of an open door for me to say, this is sort of how I view what I want, and what I would want to get out of my career.
And just the sheer fact of writing it down on paper, and sort of crafting something that may go around that made me feel like there was hope that I wouldn't necessarily be just sort of working in this corporate job for the next 30 years and sort of on this trajectory of, I get to be a senior manager or director of this or that where I was associating that desire to create much more. So, the genesis was sort of born out of, trying to create hope for myself of, at least there's an open door here, or if I put this down on paper, it becomes more real, and once I put it on paper, I can start crafting ideas about how I could bring those values to life, which may be in the form of an agency or another type of business, right. But again, it was my kind of sitting at my desk, kind of wishing and hoping and thinking that there might be something bigger or different for me in terms of my career.
Darren: Now, values are so important. And so many leaders that we work with, we talk about what's their sense of purpose, whether they're trying to find a new job and connecting that purpose with a job, or even within their organization. So, how did you take that next step? So, you had these values on paper, you had this idea you saw a market opportunity for a new agency so, how did you make that connection, including with your co-founders?
CONNECTING VALUES WITH THE BUSINESS
Kurt: Tactically, we went out to lunch together. And we sort of spoke about the idea. And really, we spoke about the need to be true to who we are, right, sort of being authentic to the approach that we wanted to take, be authentic and confident in trust in ourselves, have, that strategy, right? So, let's instill these brand pillars, these values, so to speak, and sort of craft a filtering mechanism for all the decisions that we make from there. Right. So, if we were going to create values around leadership, or honesty, or transparency or high character, or, freedom and accountability, entrepreneurship creativity, so on and so forth.
We were going to use those as our mechanism for filtering, right, so what decisions can continue to be made that sort of roll through that process, and that could be anything from our hiring do these people align with our values, it could be clients, do these clients fit our value chain, right? Do we want to work with jerks? Do we not want to work with jerks? What's the inflection point where the money that we need as a startup, doesn’t trump working with somebody who doesn't necessarily meet our value set, right?
The removal of ego in making those decisions, right to be objective about the decisions that we're making, those were all very important components to crafting our strategy, but sticking with it, right, saying, okay, there are plenty of times when we launched our business, and we're working out of our car that we said no to new business, because either the client didn't necessarily align with us from a values perspective, or, we didn't think that we were going to be able to do a good job for the client, we didn't necessarily want to hurt them or hurt our reputation, right.
So, a lot of it was our filtering mechanism. And what we found through that, strangely enough, is the more we said, no, the more we became in demand, the more we stay true to our values and the authenticity of what we wanted to create, the more resonated with people, people just wanted to work with good people, people who, kind of stood for something and weren't necessarily just about the incremental cent, or the marginal utility of each employee, or each thing that we brought to the table. It was bigger than that, and it was bigger than ourselves. I feel like that sort of resonated with the folks we've worked with. And then all of a sudden, our name, sort of the spread around certain communities that, you need to talk to these guys are fantastic people. Plus, they do great work.
Darren: A lot of companies have values, they put them on their walls, but they don't necessarily live them. I think that's fantastic. You guys are truly being authentic to them. But how did you communicate those values, especially in the early days, externally to customers? So, how do they get that impression of being transparent and fair and honesty and a lot of the things that you mentioned?
HOW THEY COMMUNICATED THEIR VALUES EXTERNALLY TO CUSTOMERS
Kurt: A lot of that was through the campaign work that we did, right. So, filling transparency, for example. If we were working with a podcast or sends us an invoice for the spot. We'll show the cost invoice and then our costs on top of that, right. And then the fact that we don't do any markups we don't make any shady deals with podcasters, or networks, or whatever the case is where there are kickbacks, right? So, truly, in its most simple sense, even the fact that we're being 100%, transparent with billing, kind of fit our values, right? And then it's saying, you guys want to spend a million dollars with us in this channel. Right? And we would go back to them and say, well, we don't necessarily think that's the best use of your million dollars, even if it means that you don't spend any money with us. We truly don't think this is the right place for you to put your money because it's not going to give the performance that you want.
And we'll give recommendations of why don't try deploying these dollars into this channel, and it might be a channel that we don't even manage as an agency, right? But we truly want to do what's right for them, to say, you may not be thinking about this, right in our opinion, maybe try and do X, Y, and Z. So, it wasn't about chasing dollars, it was about doing what we felt was the right thing, and sort of treating those clients or treating those folks, maybe they were a client, or that their money was our money. But it was really, truly just about that filtering off, let’s recommend the right thing. And if it doesn't work out this time likely hopefully, they're going to come back to us, and our reputation will precede us, right. So, it's things like that also, sort of is being honest and direct in our communications with clients, it was a really important factor, we just didn't necessarily give them a sales pitch, and Bs them, we were direct, if we felt something looked good or wasn't good, but we always did it professionally. And from the point of view of like, here's what we truly feel like is best for you first, and not necessarily best for us. Right?
HOW TO LIVE UP TO YOUR COMPANY VALUES
Darren: A long-term strategy. And easier said than done. I'm sure a lot of companies can claim to do that and always sticking to those values and those ethics, but challenging to truly live up to those things.
Kurt: It was, particularly in the early days, where you're strapped for cash, we quit our jobs. And we all had small children and mortgages at the time. And here, we were kind of working out of our car, trying to get clients in an industry that honestly is incredibly saturated and competitive. And that's agencies, right, as digital agencies, or just marketing agencies, in general, it's an insanely saturated community, particularly even in San Diego. But we truly felt like we had something of value to offer. And I honestly think the trust and confidence in ourselves was something that we always kind of held close to us. And we truly felt like we had something valuable to offer relative to the market.
So, the hope was that we stay true to ourselves, the money will come just sort of stick with it. And we were fortunate enough to where that happened. What's interesting is there were some people along the way, you're so lucky this happened, this procreates app work for you. And I'll accept that, I'll be sure. But I also know, I read a great quote once in the back of my mind is like, it takes 10 years to become lucky. Right. And again, going back to your first question, a lot of these things, myself, and my two business partners, we felt these ways going back to our early careers, right? What is the type of environment we want to create and cultivate and be a part of a third of our life, which is work, right?
How do we become and create a situation for ourselves that we're proud of every day, and that we are happy with true happiness, true joy, right? Not just surface happiness of a win here, when there, we won this account, we won that account, we lost five pounds today, I did this, I did that, right? Those are sort of happiness, tick marks, so to speak. But like true joy comes from a sort of that realization that you've crafted something truly authentic to your core, right, and who you are. And then you were able to find success from that which is incredibly validating.
THE BENEFITS OF STAYING TRUE TO YOUR VALUES
Darren: A joy is a tough thing for people to achieve. So, that's great. You can find that by truly being authentic, I found for myself and people that I've coached, that you can tap into who you are most authentically, that's when you can be happier, but also just so much more successful.
Kurt: Yes, because it provides clarity, right? In a lot of ways. It provides clarity of thought, clarity of decision-making. Again, it sort of creates that NorthStar, where you don't have to overthink something too much because you're just staying true to yourself something that's sort of natural. And if it's something that resonates with people, then you're going to be hyper-successful, hopefully fairly quickly. It's kind of amazing how something so simple. To me it was I was almost surprised by, wait so, you're saying there was this much demand for just kind of good people doing good things, right.
And it almost didn't compute for me at first, it was just something that I felt was this is just the right way to approach business, right? This is just the right thing to do. But when we started talking to a lot of New York clients or potential New York clients, it was they were craving this sort of approach to honesty and transparency and straight talk, and somebody willing to come in and be, we don't think this is the best use of your money to spend it with us. Why don't you spend it here? And they always wanted more of it. Right. And maybe I didn't have an understanding of the New York agency world and naïveté played a part in it. But I was almost surprised by sort of the way it resonated.
THE BENEFITS OF YOUR WHY STATEMENT
Darren: It just back to in terms of having values and purpose and why the word they used earlier, which I think is powerful, which is filtering in terms of filtering decisions, choices that you make, I think about often my own personal why, and just months ago, there was something that I felt was incongruent with my why and actually, my wife coached me during this amazing five-minute session in the morning and helped me understand that how that was consistent. And it's so useful in terms of guiding some of those decisions and things that you choose to do and not to do.
Kurt: And the why is important, even as you grow your business, it's incredibly important for you to believe in your why. But also, to make sure that the folks that you have on board understood the why is contextualized and that they believe in it also, right? You necessarily can't have any doubt about what you're doing. If you want other people to follow you without a doubt. Or if you want other people to sort of galvanizing around what your ideas are. And it's really easy to not doubt what you do if you are staying true to your core principles, right? Particularly if they're what society would seem to deem as good principles or honest principles, right, becomes a very easy process.
But what I found is we consistently have to contextualize what we're doing. So, if I'm creating brands, pillars for the organization and communicating them out, it can't just be, well, here's our four brand pillars, and their words on paper, here's why we chose these pillars, here's how we're going to live these pillars every day. And not only live them but create frameworks for consistently integrating them into our organization, for talking about them, for evaluating them and continuing to evolve with them, right to, pitching them to people that we're recruiting and getting them to understand who we are, right.
So, I always talk to people that were greeting you, you're interviewing us as much as we're interviewing you, you need to make sure that your values align with our values, right. And we sort of vet that in the interview process, as much as we need to understand whether their values sort of match ours, right? I want them to have that same sort of mentality of is this the right fit for me, right? And again, it's about contextualizing it, because unless you put context to that, and the way to that, people aren't necessarily going to be as bought in as you.
Darren: When you say contextualize for me, I think about allowing people to live the purpose of an organization in their way, just tapping into some of their motives and intrinsic strengths. But what do you mean, when you say contextualize?
Kurt Kaufer: Well, it's the why. So, we recently went through a sort of rebranding, sort of re pillar process or organization as we've grown. And the four values, we came up with great gratitude grit God, the four G's we call them, and it'd be one thing for me to say, everyone, we came up with these new values, they sound great on paper, it versus another thing of saying, how did we arrive at these? What do they mean? What does it mean to the organization in terms of growth, right? So, growth could mean growth of our company. It can mean growth of individuals, it could be grown as leaders, it can mean growth of our clients, it can mean growth of our network partners who create content.
Contextualize what growth means, right? And if part of that is the growth of our employees, well, what does that mean? It means we create training, it means we create frameworks for leadership training for tactical training for their jobs for lunch and learns for cross-training for conversation, for committees that talk about these things, right. That's what the contextual action of is it sort of painting the vision of, these are the values that we'd like you guys to live. And here's why we created them. And here's all the ways that we can implement them and what it means, all the way through, our performance review process of, hey, we're going to sort of grades are qualitative relative to these four components of our value chain. Right?
And once you sort of set that context, it allows people to operate sort of freely within that. So, we've had the creation of 10 different committees, all the way from a wellness committee to a recycling committee to a DNI committee you name it, right. And I haven't been guiding that what I did with sort of creating the framework and context of why it's important for organization and to them the contextualization of why is this important to you personally, why is gratitude an important trait for you both as an individual, but also as a professional? Right? And what does that mean for you, and how will this benefit you and help you grow both personally and professionally.
And once you sort of giving them that light, I think, the light bulb goes off, and they're just here's all the awesome ways that I could see me implementing this based on my interest and personality, so on and so forth. Whereas I think going back years ago, I necessarily didn't have the time to put a lot of conceptualization behind all the thought, I mentioned 10 years of thought of values, right, and the organization I wanted to build and all of that, it's really hard when you're building a business, and you're doing so many different things to then go back to your staff and sort of giving that impassioned, sort of contextual speech on here's our value chain, and why and here's what it means for you. And it sort of just becomes words on paper, and they're not as loved as they could be versus sort of what we've instituted implemented now.
HOW COMPANY VALUES HELPED AD RESULTS MEDIA OVERCOME KEY CHALLENGES IN 2020
Darren: That's great, because so many times as I said, it's just their words, on a building or a wall or an intranet site or whatnot, you talked a lot about some of the things that you've implemented to infuse your value pillars throughout the organization. Take me back a little bit in terms of some of the challenges of growing and scaling and staying truly value-centric, you started as a small firm here in San Diego, you merged with an agency in Houston now have three offices I've added a great deal of headcount. So, tell me about some of the challenges and what you did to overcome those and stay true to those values.
Kurt: Obviously, there are mistakes along the way. I tried to simplify it in my mind a little bit, right intuitively, and say, how can we institutionalize a lot of these things to stay true to them? And part of that was sort of flipping the concept of client first, on its head. Right. So, before merging with the Houston team, results, advertising, their sort of mantra as an agency was a client first. And I get it, right, we're a services organization, you want to put the clients first, I think what had happened before us merging with them was that the value was more placed on the client than the actual employee. Right. And I think culturally, there were some headwinds. Internally, you had a pretty toxic culture.
And there were folks in there who are cancerous and they had sort of a set of values that they had on paper, but no one was living them, no one was institutionalizing them. And it just wasn't being sorted of proliferated at all, or, at any sort of frequency, right. So, the client wasn't coming first, because the employees weren't being focused on right. And those are the frontline of our business to our client. So, when I came in, I was just let's flip it on its head. Let's make the employee the hub. And then you have all the different spokes, right? So, the employee hub is HR, let's create an HR group. Right?
So, let's create a focal point or fulcrum for what this organization can do to grow. And stay client first, but it's client first by being employee first. And that simple sort of switch, it seems sort of like semantics, but that simple switch changed everything where we're able to go through and then say, okay, we're employee first, we need to look at our benefits. Where can we improve our benefits? If we're employees first, we need to focus on developing leadership, we needed to focus on creating goals, which weren't there. We need to institute goal setting we need to institute performance reviews we need to institute one on one. We need to institute methods of communication between leaders and subordinates.
We need to create messages from the top down what we're doing as an organization, right, we need to revamp our entire recruiting process. What questions are we asking what profiles are we looking for? What emphasis are we placing on the folks that we're bringing in? Are we placing more emphasis on leadership and critical thinking and problem solving, something that's a bit more qualitative and harder to train in nature, are we placing emphasis that company on somebody who can come in here hammer out a ton of work, but they're just miserable? And they create sort of a toxic culture, although they're sort of operating at some level of efficiency that may have been deemed appropriate, right?
So, I really sort of took a step back and said, we need to sort of break down the organization and rebuild it based on the theory of employee being first, right. And the filtering system was the values that we had in place at that point, at that point, it was like 10, different values, right, it was a lot. And these are all the things that sort of had, bubbled up over my lifetime, that we put on paper that I'm we need to do all these things, right. And I just didn't understand sort of that it may have been overwhelming for employees to see that many, or at least remember them, right, versus the crystallization of one to four different values, but it was there, and it was our filtering system, so is sort of that, that sort of shift in culture and mindset of yes, we're client first, but we're employee first, right. And if you build an incredible employee base, one that's sticky, when that's evolving, and growing, and talented, and happy and motivated and inspired, then the client is going to get the best possible service that they can, because of that employee base, is willing to run through a brick wall for them, and for you and themselves, right.
And you name it, we sort of under on earth, every single stone in the organization and figured out where we could do better and where we feel like we could be more employee-centric. And the institutional values in the earliest was the filtering system. And that the evolution was, we had created, the framework, and then we create new values to kind of go above that back in 2018.
HOW TO UPDATE COMPANY VALUES TO ADAPT TO A CHANGING ORGANIZATION
Darren: How do those value shifts, you mentioned 10 values from the early days of Brown Bear Digital, and then calling those down into four. So, what was the drive of the shift of those? And where do those come from?
Kurt: I think simplification, right? What I was noticing over time was that myself, and some of the other leaders, I'm sort of living the values daily. And they understood the values, it was contextualized for them. And they were living them daily, and they may have been leadership, accountability, collaboration, integrity, productivity, self-development, knowledge, professionalism, these are a lot of the values that we had sort of instituted right, I put that in air quotes because I thought I'd instituted on my credit, one-two years for folks, I sent it out there, we were trying to sort of integrating them into this new performance review process that we created from scratch. But what I was finding was that it was probably the top 5%, that sort of embody the values and live the values and the other 95% weren't because we didn't have a champion internally.
Sort of, in that's HR in our head of HR, sort of living these values daily, and working with our folks frequently to let make them understand sort of like what these values mean, and why it's beneficial for them in the organization. So, that champion didn't exist. And the other thing was I think they were diluted in a sense, because there were so many, right, I didn't necessarily crystallize what the values were, I put a bunch of sorts of words on paper that I felt looked good, and that I felt were important to growing a business or growing personally or professionally.
But it was a lot, and I didn't necessarily make it easy for them to adopt, or adapt to them. Right. So, when I truly got a chance to kind of sit back and say, how do I get the other 95% of our organization on board with these values, where they're using the same filtering system, where they're approaching their jobs, in the same way where they're motivating, inspiring others where they're truly leading? How do I do that? I kind of went back to the drawing table. And part of what came out was we need to simplify our value chain. Right? How do we sort of encompassing all the things that may have been written before, but sort of crystallizing them a bit better so people can understand? And then how do we roll that out? Right, how do we create a mechanism of frequency? How do we create a mechanism for adoption? How do we put people in positions to lead the efforts of proliferating these values within the organization and using them as their filters, right?
So, part of the genesis I was somewhat frustrated with myself for not being able to do a good enough job of getting people to adopt these. Whereas they probably again, roll their eyes and said, there is Kurt again, talking about like, critical thinking in his town hall meeting or this or that, but they were passionate to me, they were probably empty words to others, where they didn't necessarily see sort of what I saw, right. So, I needed to figure out a way for them to see what I saw and to get them to truly live them daily. So, that was the Genesis.
HOW THEIR VALUES PILLARS HELPED AD RESULTS MEDIA SURVIVE A CHALLENGING 2020
Darren: You mentioned in terms of having these values enabled people to run through brick walls for you. The last six months have been incredibly challenging on so many levels. How have those value pillars supported your success and just hanging in there during this challenging time?
Kurt: It's amazing what our HR team has done that kind of help Institute this stuff. And I'll try to give some examples, let's say gratitude, right, every Friday, and we're going through challenging times, there are COVID people are working from home, there's a lot of sort of, adaption, there are social justice issues, there are fires, there's a tornado, there's a hurricane, everything. 2020 is just that disaster, it's a disaster of the year. Right? So, as people, what are we sort of relying upon to get through these tough moments. And part of that is the reliance on say, community people around you. And it's the reliance on a concept of gratitude to amongst other things, right. But when I look at those two things, specifically community, I can sort of translate that into guidance or growth, right, and our ability as an organization to help guide people through this journey, and help them grow and evolve as individuals to get through these tough times.
And then there's gratitude, right, the appreciation of each other, the appreciation of the community, the appreciation of somebody else's work, and the validation that comes from that right, the positivity that is essentially exuded from the simple act of, we have a gratitude Friday, on slack. On Friday, we have an employee's board where everyone's slacks what they're grateful for, and it could be you're grateful to somebody else for helping you with a simple task, it could be that you're grateful that you got to hug your dog today, it could be that you're grateful for the organization, anything that you're grateful for, put it on this board, right.
And it's taken off as people love it, and it makes people feel good, right. And no matter how sort of down you might be, reading the messages of gratitude, or an incredible reminder of all the goodness and good things that still exists, and that are still going on, in terms of guidance and community, we've created a ton of committees, right, and a lot of the formation of the committees were really to come back, sort of lack of connection that comes from COVID are working from home. So, the committee's, like I said, we had social committees, you know, wellness committees, we've had the DNI committee, we've had recycling committees, we've had yearbook committees, we've had cookbooks, I can't even name all the different initiatives that have happened to help sort of galvanize the team and bring them together, I'd almost argue that the organization post-COVID, is closer with each other than it was pre-COVID, based on the institutionalization of our values, right?
So, they're able to take something like gratitude or guidance, and guidance can be in the form of, here are some tips and tricks and how to work from home efficiently. Here are some tips and tricks on how to manage somebody remotely. All these documents, and all these processes, were all created post-COVID, to guide for folks to do their job, and to help them feel supported. And that came from the filtering system of our values, right? And then there's grit, right, just sort of the sheer fact that like, yeah, we're all going through it. And, sometimes you just need the grit to keep going, sometimes there's just not the answer of, if only this got better, or what was me, or what was me for this, or whatever the case is, it's just okay, this is what it is. Let's roll up the sleeves and kind of get it done. Right.
So again, I think the framework of the four G's has provided the institutionalization and creativity, the institutionalization of the application of these ideas or the values but also, it allowed people to be creative about how to approach it. Right. And I didn't have to dictate that anymore. It became a living, breathing, evolving mechanism within the organization. That I'm proud of and I'm proud of everyone who is sort of stepped up and took the effort to understand the contextualization of what these values mean and how they can apply them and how it could benefit them. And what I always tell folks, whether it's in an interview, whether I'm doing like a skip level meeting with them is, I don't want anyone to ever leave out results media, if you want to be here for the next 30 years of your career, that's fantastic.
But I'm not misguided in the sense that I think you're going to stay here forever. But what I will say is that my job is to prepare you for the growth of your career and the evolution of your career personally, and professionally, no matter what. So, if you do leave Ad Results Media, you're a better professional, and you're maybe a better person than you were when you walk through these doors. And for that, I'm incredibly proud of what we're doing as an organization, not just in terms of client service, but the development of people and within our organization, and truly being sort of people-centric, right. And I think when people hear that, they're inspired to go help somebody else, right?
Well, I want to help that person become better, even if they don't stay here, it's not a waste of my time, right, if the end game is for me to be proud of what they become, or who they become, regardless of their results or not, then we're all on the same page of let's help each other out, right, because it's just the right thing to do.
And I think people have sort of resonated with that.
Darren: You truly have maintained a value-centric organization, and that's great to hear that it's been an anchor point, during some challenging times.
Kurt: It has, and I don't think it would have been possible without the creation of our HR group. And, and there's somewhat of our Trojan horse, right. And they're able to kind of work with people directly in Siena who dared, and she's been amazing about taking these ideas and bringing them to life. And I think she bought in when I told her the concept of, you're the hub, right, HR and human resources. And it's the catalyst of [inaudible 37: 05] we could say it's the new client when or the client spending x, but none of this is happening without a strong internal core.
And once she understood that vision, and what we were trying to do, and understood the impact that she has, and human resources have on the development of people, in addition to sort of the correlation to the growth of the company, it was kind of amazing to see it come to life and come to life pretty quickly. And before our merger without results, they didn't have an HR team, right? Again, it was sort of this concept that they had these words on paper, but they didn't necessarily take action to institute them and no fault of their own, it was just something that I think we're able to come in and sort of ticket different approach to it.
KURT’S ADVICE TO LEADER WHO WANT TO CREATE A MORE VALUES-DRIVEN COMPANY
Darren: Last question, for you to close this out. What advice do you have for leaders who are trying to infuse some of those values into their team, or even their leadership style, or to the organization?
Kurt: Make the process of value creation collaborative. And I didn't mention this before, but when we created the four G's, we have a steering committee, and the steering committee consists of eight different people, we can call them a leadership team. And instead of me saying, I'm going to think of these values and kind of push them downward, right, which is kind of what I did originally, right? When we took this step back, we had a couple of days of meetings, off-sites, we took them off-site. And we made them a part of the value creation process, right.
And it was getting feedback from each person. They're sort of their personal views on specific values, but also, they can communicate with their teams who use or certain individuals within their teams. So, I truly understood kind of where we were organizational, right, what people desire and what they thought was valuable. And then we can craft something that sort of made sense for everyone that they had bought into, right, there was immediate buy-in because they helped craft it. And once you have the leadership team buy-in, which includes HR, the proliferation of those ideas becomes much easier to institute because they're bought in, it's pre contextualized, right? They're already bought in, they're willing to kind of hit the ground running and run through a brick wall for you to get these values instituted because they're a part of the process.
And that was an important component that was missed way back. And I feel like that was also a huge catalyst for us, not only sort of nailing the values, I think there were the right values. But getting them sort of institutionalized, which is even a harder step then than the creation of them. And then from a fun point of view, I'm not going to say everyone should do this, but when we announced the values at the town hall, we had somebody, create a rap song about it. And a DJ come in, and they did a rap about it and did this whole sort of song and dance around it. And really, the point was to get everyone energized and make it fun and not just some boring sort of corporate initiative. Right.
It was really sort of bringing it to life in ways and then we had each leader talk about in personal life, what each value meant to them and tell a personal story, right? So again, contextualize it and personalize it. Right? So, that people truly understood, I didn't know that, so and so you went through this in real life that shows grit, or, someone that went out there and talked about what they're grateful for, or, how somebody mentored or guided them in their career, and the impact that it had on them, right, use podcasting example, podcasting, storytelling, use stories to contextualize, what we're trying to do and get people to truly sort of relating to it.
Darren: Great. Well, Kurt, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. I do appreciate it.
Kurt: Absolutely. This was fun.