Eric Himes on Building a People First Business Culture

And I say, as leaders, our number one thing is to multiply and empower others. And so that should be the first thing we invest into every time. Why? It's a multiplying impact. You can multiply yourself across 10 or work through your own task list. I would choose to multiply myself and empower people to have that success and grow. Most trade leaders are working harder than ever and still stuck. There's a better way to compete. And it starts with people. This is Blue Collar Smart, hosted by Hugh Hornsby, 40-year trade executive, industry award winner, and the only media voice built for leadership on both sides of the trade. Every episode, one truth, one action, one step forward. Welcome to Blue Collar Smart. Good afternoon. I am so excited. This is the second edition of the Blue Collar Smart podcast, Built Different. for the trades. A podcast that's really for everybody. And today I've got a friend that I have met that has an incredible story, starting with being highly successful in the business world, hitting burnout. And I'm going to let him tell a little bit about that story, but it's Eric Himes. Eric has built the inspirational operating system. and Eric explain who you are, what you're doing, what the inspirational operating system are, and how did you get to where you are today? Yeah, definitely Hugh. Thanks. And it's an honor to be here with you on your podcast. And I'm just, I'm hopeful that everybody tuning in, we connect well with our story today and all that we have to share. And a little bit about me, I've got five kids, a beautiful wife, and four of them are girls. And then the youngest is a boy and he's eight. And so we have a range of eight to 17. You can only imagine we're pretty outnumbered in the house when it comes to that. But a great family, really fortunate and grateful for God's gift there in that. He's just blessed every, our family and our kids and really grateful. And a little bit about my vocational background. I started at Home Depot way back in the day and worked there as a store manager for a number of years. But I wasn't always there. I started there as a cashier and worked my way up over a six-year period of time. And then left that and went into the medical device world working at Daniel's Health and had a great career there of working there for 19 years. And had a lot of opportunities to do some really neat things with some really incredible folks in that. And then that ended and I began the Inspired Culture almost three years ago. So we're coming up on a three-year anniversary here soon. And so that's where we're at today. And our goal and our focus is to help companies and organizations grow through some of the frameworks that we've developed, meaning measuring the growth mindset and helping people win on all fronts of life and a number of different tools that we have available for people to access and utilize to win. And that's personally and professionally. And that focus is on helping organizations too. We'll start to get into some of the organizations that you've helped. But one of the things that really brought us together is that I found it the people-based business movement, even though sometimes you think it's a movement of one, but that's where it all gets started. You are big about people, how people are treated. And you've seen sides of it, especially from corporate America, how sometimes people get lost just in the numbers and sometimes they just get lost in trying to perform. But I'm going to take a step back because I think the success that you had with your career have brought you to where you are. And I think I remember you saying that at one point you felt like your success was all based on your performance level within the business itself. And then possibly something happened after that to make you start looking at a different way of taking a look at business and taking a look at people and basically leadership. Is that correct? Yeah, that's absolutely right. I ran it hard, as hard as I could run, justifying it all the way through. I was on 1,500 airplanes over 19 years. I was always gone. I was, gosh, gone on average two to three nights a week, every week. I'd be leaving on Sundays a lot of the times and getting home on Thursdays. And then I'd just be exhausted through the weekend only to live out of a suitcase again for another week. And granted, that was my choice and had some really great opportunities in doing that. But what I realized is later, much later, I gave everything that I had into my career and I didn't give everything that I needed to give to my family and to myself really to create the best version of me. I created the best version of me as a company, as an individual in an organization, but I did not do that on all fronts of my life. And I recognize that in leadership, we can lead through a number of different avenues. It's metrics and performance metrics to PNLs to you name it, and goals and whatnot to accomplish budgets, et cetera. The reality though is that nothing happens without people. And as leaders, our first job is to take care of our people and really help them grow and develop. And so I learned that over time in and on my own value and word, I believe the lie that my performance equaled my worth. Right. And I believe that for a really long time, as long as I'm performing, I'm low. Right. And that in the root of it, but that's the biggest lie ever. But I believed it and those around me helped me believe it for a period of time in that. Was there one incident that happened with you, Eric, that kind of made you start to flip the switch? Yeah, absolutely. So I hit burnout, but I also lost everything. I lost my family. I lost my first marriage. All of it. Because I was so focused on, one, the work that I'm doing and just being gone and being detached in so many other ways. And so it cost a lot, really. And so when that breaking point hit, I just knew and I did everything I could to try to save my marriage and it didn't work out, unfortunately. But fortunately, God gave me an incredible woman to get married to named Heather. And it's been the best thing in the world. And God has done great things. And so I'm grateful for the place I'm in today on everything that God has done there. So I hit this place, and I just realized that we could do something different. I was separated and really went through just a hard time, and I had a choice to make. I was in the church probably for 15 years of my life at this point, but I wasn't living it out. I was sleeping in church, I call it, to where I went every Sunday because that was what I was supposed to do. but I actually didn't have my own faith. My faith was through the community that I was in, but I wasn't actually living it out on my own. And so I decided to stop what I was doing and start following Christ. And that pivotal moment, all of a sudden, it was like relearning everything. I couldn't stop reading the Bible. I would read it for eight hours a day. and I'm like, where's this been my whole life? And my buddies say, yeah, remember I gave that to you when you were like 24? Well, yeah, yeah, you did. It just collected dust the entire time. And so I just had this and just the Holy Spirit was speaking. And it helped me heal through a ton of childhood wounds that I had from my parents and my upbringing and some of those things, which I never knew I needed to deal with. But then too, dealt with them And then all of a sudden dealing with that, having the Heavenly Father's love, it was just such a different transformational event in my life. And it gave me the ability to see a lot differently than I was seeing before. And no longer did I have to compete with my dad, right? Because I always had to compete with him. He wanted to always one-up me no matter what. And so I'm like, I'll work hard enough and eventually he'll love me for who I am because and earned his love And so that lived and that played out in a lot of different places in my life with all of that That a great story I know that a tough one to tell sometimes because I in the process of writing a book and some of that comes out and it hurts. And as I went through stage four cancer diagnosis and boy, things really start to bubble up. But what's amazing is the question I guess I have for you is that a lot of the people that's going to be listening to this podcast, both on the trade side and on the wholesale side, are founders that they built their business from scratch, very much like you did. And they built their business from scratch and they kind of hit that wall. And whatever that wall is, sometimes they need to sell their business. Sometimes they're trying to figure out how they can exit. And sometimes, like a lot of founders do, they try to make all those decisions. And what is it that you can share with them that you feel could be helpful in helping them out of that position or that place? Yeah. One, recognize that it's not all of your work to do alone. Because a lot of times we believe that it's got to be, it's up to me. That's not true. We have people. There's a group there. There's other people that want to help you win, believe it or not, in this world. And they work probably in your organization too. And so don't feel as though you got to carry the weight alone. The second thing, trust God. Really believe in what he has for you and know that he's going to help you through it. And he will. And the deeper relationship that you have with him, the more you're going to be able to see the more that he can help guide the ship and the more fruit come that comes from it and it's just a different way i can't sit here and say i don't live without pressure or stress from day to day because i think as founders we all have it from time to time but it's where we go with it when it shows up right and so when we where we go with it everything. It's not ours to keep and carry. It's ours to give away, right? And we give that, we go to the Lord and give that to him knowing that he has our best interests in his heart. I love that because I always say when I get into a situation and I went through a lot in my life, and so I always had to overcome. And there's times when I say, is the old Hugh going to show up and where I'm just going to take it to you, or am I going to say, give it to the Lord and say, hey, just give me the words. Let me work through it. And that really helped me through cancer. Let's jump into another topic, because the last company I worked for, I think you and I talked about, the CEO was a Hasidic Jewish guy out of New York City, great person, very faithful in his own faith. He always appreciated my faith, but we looked at the world from different perspectives. And when you get into companies, because you deal with a lot of companies that are very faithful, but there are people in there that are looking at it from a different perspective, how do you handle that? And how do you maybe have that conversation with other people that are dealing with that type of situation? We don't have a bias when it comes to that, because everybody has their own right to believe what they want to believe. Right. And so we, one, don't force our belief onto anyone. The only thing we could do is lead through humility and create curiosity and let people become curious when they're ready. We shouldn't hide what we believe either. But at the same point, we got to make room for everybody. to create that working environment. And so when you come in and these leaders that are faith-based leaders that really live and breathe these principles out, it doesn't mean and require everybody else has to believe that totally, but they get to experience it. And that experience usually brings an incredible culture into play. We help organizations cultivate what we call the inspired culture to where leaders focus holistically on the individuals, right? And so we want to help them win at home, win at work, personally and relationally. And so this way, leaders are getting led and trained up to actually be all in on their people, helping them win everywhere, right? And so it's not only the job that you did for me for the day, and that's where our relationship ends. A lot of times, I think that's where it begins. We're here, we get the opportunity to work together, but we just put in a full day, eight hours. I want the leaders to be saying to their teams, hey, thanks for the great day today. Your family needs you. Where's your head at? And how are you going to show up for them? Because this is the second part of the game. You had the warmup, which was the eight hours, but what counts right now is who you're going home to. And so how are you going to show up? How are you going to be engaged? Leave work here. It's going to be here for you tomorrow. So there's no need to think about it or do anything. We're really not getting ahead. So invest your time in your family. And what that does is it creates this intrinsic leader, this intrinsic team member, because now their identity isn't wrapped up in what they do. It's who they're becoming, which is their calling no matter what. And so we want to help people live that out fully because everything changes, even productivity value of work. Companies are winning. Profits are skyrocketing. And they also have innovation that goes so much further because they keep their talent, right? Their team wants to stick around those types of people because they know that they're being invested in. I always say it's called the be, do, and have, right? That's right out of the Bible. But become the person that you want to become. I think the biggest challenge a lot of times is people don't have clarity of who that is. And it's almost like you have to start over again with people and say, hey, what's the dream you left behind? That's what I do. That's what I've always done. But do you find when you go through what you just said, it's not only about retaining your people. It's about having other people that want to be a part of that culture. Absolutely. And you said something really key there too is what and how, right? And so not all the time that we know because by accident, maybe we showed up in our vocation. And that's happened to me and a lot of people I know because we go through school or we move out of the house or whatever, we've got bills. And now I got to find a job that's going to help pay my bills, even though maybe it's not totally aligned with what I'm called to do or my intentional purpose behind it. And so one of the things that we help people with is actually understanding their why and how that actually connects to them and their deeper work and how that connects to the organizational why. So they actually recognize and understand they do matter. The work that they're doing matters and they actually have a major impact on the organizational vision and moving it forward. Yeah, I love that. Who was it that said, help enough people get what they want, they'll help you get what you want. And then the other one is always stop following the followers. One of the things, I love what you just said, because I'm passionate about it. Because I think what we do is an art a lot of times. And you can create right where you stand If you know what it is that you're trying to reach and who it is you're trying to help, don't you think you can start that just right from the job or the opportunity that you have and really start looking at life on a long-term vision that will take you from there to wherever it is you want to go? Absolutely. You can't keep what you don't give. And the reality is that we all have the opportunity to serve somebody else. and you don't have to have a title of CEO or president or a director or anything. You can be you and whatever that is and you can serve those around you and be willing to see others needs before your own. And it's just a slight change of the lenses and then you'll find at first that it might be a new habit. That's not normal because the world says go after what you want, go get what you need and take care of yourself where really it's the opposite that wins the day every time. And so we want to help you win the day and we want to help you see through lenses of what it is to give right And giving a lot of people think it money And really, it's a great listening ear. It's a heart seeing somebody else's heart. It's actually being there to want to, if you have the wisdom to provide in that moment for that individual, and walking through hard together with it and learning and growing. Because when you have people that want you to win, there's nothing better than that and you wanting others to win, right? It's this thing that you can give away. And it costs you nothing, literally nothing. But it changes everything around you. And it all starts with why, don't you think? And knowing where you're going. And believe me, nobody knows more that clarity is one of the most important things that we do. And as I've had success in business, sometimes I was running after the wrong things. But how about this, Eric? How about those people that are helping everybody else around them but themselves? I think that a lot of times you find that in business. You find one person that's just running for the numbers, and you find another person that wants to help everybody else but themselves. And then you find a Hugh Hornsby that hits the wall and gets diagnosed with stage four cancer. And you realize you've been taking bullets for everybody at the top and then everybody at the bottom, but nobody's taking bullets for you. We have a mask for that, actually. It's a protecting mask in a way. And the thing that I have to say is that the best version of you can't exist unless you invest into it. Yeah. And that personal investment doesn't look like climbing the ladder. You have to take the time to feed and care for yourself. So what are the things that you need? I look at the things that I need. I know that my best days are the days that I get time to be with God and read His Word and in prayer. I get a workout in. I get quality time with my wife in the morning. We're reading the Bible together in prayer. And then I start my day. But if I don't charge my battery first, I don't have as much to give everyone else. And so that's part of the refueling process for me. And I need good sleep. I need good sleep. That's the self-care requirement. And I also think about what I eat. And I know the world is full of fast food and all these other things, but it gives you just a fog over time. If that's all you're eating all the time, it's just like it creates this fog and you're not even operating at an optimal position. And so by the time you get home, your nutrients have been depleted, which then you don't have the energy to show up for your family because you also didn't pack in the food that you needed to eat. So those are some of the things. And the other thing is making sure that I'm aligned with the vision that God has for my life. As long as I'm in alignment, we're good. If I'm out of alignment, that's going to create a lot of challenges because now I'm going to be carrying a lot more weight that isn't mine to carry. I tell you what, that's the one thing as I went through cancer that I realized that the answer was always there. I just had to ask sometime and stop thinking that I had to carry all that pressure on myself. Because I think stress is one of the worst things that happens to a body. And the next thing that I just wanted to say is that when I met Eric, we started having a conversation. It wasn't that long ago. And I was telling him some of the things that turned around and built up 10 companies all based on people and how I had really had success in a very different way. but then we started talking a little bit about your operating system and it like the lights went off on me because I always had an operating system but I never really had written it down in a way that it made sense for other people so let's talk a little bit about your iOS and talk a little bit about what you're doing there and then we'll talk about the program that you have set up for not only founders, but for just anybody that really is trying to become a leader from almost the bottom up. I'm excited because when you think about companies today and what they measure and what they manage, it's all KPI driven. It's all financial statement driven. It's all goal oriented. And that's it. And who's contributing to it? All of us, right? We're all contributing to those financial statements. And it's not a bad thing. It's part of what we do. It's part of how we get compensated, all of those things. And so there's an importance there. But the reality is the people drive the numbers. People drive the outcomes and nothing happens without people. Even in a world of AI today, things are happening in AI, but it's still a person leading the company. Right. And so there's always people. And the reality was for us was what you measure becomes important. And so what we did was is we wanted to measure the growth mindset. And why we thought and why we feel and why we believe this is important is because behavior drives results every day, all day. And it's, by the way, the only thing that drives and delivers results. And it's not the only thing that delivers results at work. It also delivers results at home. We got to invest the time and the effort to get the outcomes that we need, but we got to have a way to do that in a balanced environment. And so we created the Inspired OS and it goes through the five key areas in helping people grow and develop intentionally. And so at the end of every week, you get a mindset score. So Eric, what are those five key areas? Yeah. So we cover the personal why. We get into the vision alignment. We get into personal developmental habits, professional developmental leadership habits, and those are identified in categories of relational, personal, and professional. So we're really dialed in on what that looks like. We have three weekly goals, one that's personal and two that are associated with the organization. And we have 60-day BHAGs. These are a little bit longer and stretch goals, one for me and one for the organization. So this way, we're reaching, learning, and growing intentionally over that. And so those are the areas that we measure. But then there's this engagement conversation that happens. And so we want people to grow. It's really important. but we got to activate certain things in the mind to do that. And so our tool does it, right? And so one of the things that I always like talking about looking through lenses is we look through the lenses a lot of times as leaders or as individuals at home or at work of what's not done. And it's always what's next to do instead of recognizing what has been done, what we did. And so we identify the wins for the week. Where did we win? Three places, right? That's supporting our intentional growth and development with our habits and goals. And so this gives us an opportunity to talk about that. And then it also gives others the ability to say, especially leaders and companies, hey, I also noticed this because we have to train our eyes and their eyes to see other good things that are happening in the moment to water that, right, to help that grow. And then the next component of this, we get into activating the strategic thinking mindset. And this is really important because a lot of times, people always call me, you, or others for the answer, right? When we don't know it. And we give the answer. Why? Because we want to be productive in our leadership. And we got a long list of items to do. And so let me give the answer, send them on their way, and we can keep going. The challenge with that is everybody's happy for the moment, but we've trained everybody to just come back again and again. And we're the bottleneck of the company. And we feel great about ourselves. Yeah. Because we think we have the answer. Yeah, we can help people out and it feels good. And it's like this thing that's unvaluable because I know everything and people need me, right? We get this idea sometimes, which isn't true in that sense of the message. And so we get into this next part of the operating system and it's about the challenges that we face. We identify two challenges for the week and then how did we work through them And it not calling somebody to get the answer even though maybe it sometimes it is But the challenge we want is to actually train the brain not to go to the simplest route but actually to learn how to overcome challenges and become a strategic thinker Because that gives us the ability to grow in our ability and how we're evaluating and thinking through things. it also allows me as a leader to see my team how they're thinking about things and so one they have the ability now to have more confidence in their decisions because I'm letting them know that hey great job you figured it out you went down the path I also as a leader have confidence in their ability to solve problems so I can empower them and give them a lot more ownership because they have the capability and they demonstrate that every week on how to solve challenges that they were up against. I love that because I had this seven-step process that I used to take my team through. But at the very back of that process was that after I've invested in you and you've become a part of something bigger than yourself and you've tied your dream into the company's dream and tying that all together after, and then it ran a cycle. But the biggest part of it was a handshake I used to do that said, but once we go through this and I've invested in you, now your job is to go out and invest in other people. So what you're talking about there is really giving them the tools so that they can go out and then make this world a better place. And that's pretty amazing. How did you come up with that. Yeah, no, I appreciate that, Hugh. I just want to add one more bit to it. And the final step of the operating system is feedback, right? And so we've changed the whole dialogue about annual reviews and quarterly reviews. We do a weekly. And when people are like weekly, how can you do that weekly? And I say as leaders, our number one thing is to multiply and empower others. And so that should be the first thing we invest into every time. Why? It's a multiplying impact. You can multiply yourself across 10 or work through your own task list. I would choose to multiply myself across and empower people to have that success and grow. And feedback, why is it so hard? Because we don't practice it enough and there isn't a place to practice it. And so at the time that annual review comes up and I got a rating of a 3.8 out of 5, but I thought I was a 4.2 and that impacts my finances, I actually hear nothing else that you're saying because I actually didn't get the financial increase that I wanted. And so now all of a sudden I'm just processing emotions about how am I going to go home and tell my wife and my family I only got this amount of money or this puts X, Y, and Z off from that standpoint. And then a year, another year goes by. And as a leader, I don't remember what I reviewed you on last year until I opened it up and look at it right before this one to see how everything looked and happened. And so we want to give feedback in the moment. We want to teach people that feedback is your best friend. And we want to help people, one, give it great, receive it well. And so we created the feedback channel to be leader to the team member and team member to the leader because we can both learn in feedback. And so this happens on a weekly basis. And then you get your mindset score and keep going. And that's really the operating system. And the cool thing is we give the ability for companies to see mindset in real time. And so any organizational leader can look at way in advance what's going on and they don't need a survey to understand it because they can look at their the mindset score and how they're doing by market, by address, by team, by entire division and organization. We break it down. And this gives early warning signs and you can take action now and be proactive in helping move things along based on where departments' mindsets are. And you'll see it every week and you have trends and all the information needed to be proactive as a leader. That is so powerful. You and I could go on for hours because we're kind of talking to the choir, so to speak, because we so believe in this. As we kind of wrap this up, and we're going to do a lot, Eric and I are going to do a lot of things together as we kind of move our businesses forward. I want to make sure people know where to go to get the different concepts that you have. So can you start with the, which one do you, you have a website and on that website, there's opportunities because I just went in and did, I think it was the 50 questions. 50 masks of leadership. Yeah. And so how would somebody get ahold of Eric Himes and what's the best way to go about that? Yeah, definitely. So you can check out our website at www.yourpathinspired.com and you'll, there's a host of information there. And if you want to connect with me directly, you could do that at Eric Himes. And that's E-R-I-C-H-I-M-E-S-2-4 at yourpathinspired.com. I'll give you my personal email. Feel free to reach out. We have a great team of people here. And they're all here to want to help grow and develop cultures and companies and put forward the best tools that we have. So check us out there. You've got a big event coming up in November. Can you share a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. So we have the Inspired Culture Summit coming up on November 16th and 17th. It's in Naperville, Illinois, for those of you that want to join and attend live. But we're also live streaming the event as well. So anybody can get tickets to the event all around the world and have that pretty similar experience because it's going to be live streamed from that. And we have a host of incredible speakers talking on life change, culture development, and really those of us that have lived it out firsthand, just like you, Hugh. And really giving a lot of the blueprint to those who are checking it out. And for those of you that are out there, I will be attending that event as well with my good friend over here, Eric Himes, and that group. Eric, I usually try to end this podcast with some type of golden nugget. And is there one thing that you can share with other people that you feel like that you can leave them that will really help them in ways that is going to take them forward? Yeah. What I would say is day one and your opportunity is right now. And so whatever you've lived through, wherever you're at on your journey in this moment of this time, know today can be a new day and it could be a day that begins your journey. And if you're in the middle of your journey, keep going. I know it's hard. It's not easy. but it's worth it. It's really worth it. And the way things are done today doesn't mean they have to be done the same way tomorrow. Love that. Love that. Eric Himes, wow, you are a gift to this world. I want to say thank you for your friendship and thank you so much for the wisdom that you bring. And what I love about you is that you've lived it and you've taken your life and flipped it from one place to another. I want to say congratulations for that. Thanks, Hugh. I appreciate it. And it's such an honor to spend time with you here today. And I'm excited for all the blessings that one, you're going to provide to others through your podcast and through the work that you're doing. And I just want you to know we're cheering you on and we're really excited for all that you're doing and grateful to be part of it. Well, this is the second podcast, Blue Collar Smart, Built Different, for the trades and actually for everybody. And Eric Himes, thank you very much. You're welcome. Every great trade organization was built by someone who chose people over price. Blue Collar Smart exists for that leader. If you found value here, subscribe and share this with the operator who's ready for the next level. Built different. Trades proven. Hugh Hornsby, Voice of the Trades. you