It all started when the advertising group I was part of agreed to do the customer engagement survey. I scored the lowest of the 15 stores in the group. Of course, being a lumberyard, we thought we were different and poked holes in the survey. We were in denial. Linda told us that to validate the results, the employee engagement survey generally mirrors the customer engagement survey. So we agreed to take the employee engagement survey, and it came out even worse. We were bad. We had a heavily male-dominated, take-it-or-leave-it culture that I learned from my father. In today’s world, that type of culture absolutely does not work. Even after we started, we weren’t walking the walk.

During the economic downturn, we saw how difficult it was to hire and retain people. We had a good culture, but we knew if we wanted to recruit and retain the best talent when the economy rebounded, we were going to have to be more purposeful with our culture. I met Linda at an Ace Progressive Leaders meeting in Nashville through another retailer who was working with her. I heard her presentation, and I knew I wanted to work with her.

My mantra is that the best place to work makes for the best place to shop, and you can’t get there without building a great team. I’ve always been a big believer in culture, training and empowerment. Linda helped us take our core values, which were always very strong, but weren’t embedded, and turn them into tangible, actionable words that we can employ and bake into everything we do. It was a really cool process.