Modern Health

Culture is not something you build. It's something you earn. Most leaders have it backwards. They chase culture like it's the prize. Offsites. Values on the wall. A whole lot of talking about it. Then the market turns and it evaporates in one all-hands. We watched that across tech. A ton of it was hot air. Here's the formula that actually works. Right people. Right room. Right process. Invest in the people first, and mean it. Culture, product, and customer success all fall out the other side. I call it the People Dividend. Look at Delta Air Lines. Every February they share profit with the people who run the operation. This year, 1.3 billion dollars. A ramp worker on an hourly wage opens their account and finds close to a month of extra pay. What does that person do the next morning? They show up early. They treat the on-time departure like they own it. And you feel it as a customer. If you've flown Delta, you know exactly what I mean. That energy is not a slogan. It's the dividend paid back for investing in people first. Same story at Costco. Pay above market. Promote from within. The CEO started as a forklift driver. Retention around 94% in an industry that loses most of its people inside a year. When people feel genuinely invested in, they get intoxicated by what you're building. The customer feels it too. The story becomes bigger than the product. You can't fake it and you can't buy it with a good week. If you're leading a team, remember the formula. People first. The right room. The right process. Then get out of the way. Culture was never the goal. It was always the dividend.

As I build, I reflect: Culture doesn't die on the front line. It dies in the boardroom. We spent years blaming managers for broken culture. Wrong floor. The responsibility goes all the way up. To the board. To the investors. To the people setting the targets. Here's what actually happened across tech. Overhiring dressed up as momentum. An investor says go, go, go, hire faster, chase the valuation. So you dump gas on the fire and build all this momentum. It feels incredible. Then a year later you lay off half the people you hired. Not because they failed. Because you never could afford them and the business model never needed them. You just needed the headcount to hit a number. That's the time bomb. And when it goes off, the momentum doesn't just slow. It gets sucked out from the inside. The culture goes with it. You can't lay off half a team and tell the other half you value people. They watched. Real leadership sometimes means growing slower on purpose. Say it out loud in the room. We can go a little slower for the sake of the people. Retention will be better. Lifetime value will be higher. The business wins in the end. You don't have to chase every shiny object that feels good now and guts you later. If you want great culture, great margins, and customers who stay, you protect it at every level. All the way up the cap table. Culture was never the goal. It was the dividend. And dividends get destroyed at the top.

Hey RevOps folks in prop tech and building services! I think we know that we're playing a different sport, and most vendors that serve large portfolios are playing it blind. Your account isn't just a company. It's a company sitting on top of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of properties. Every one is a roof at its own street address, with its own site team, its own residents, its own vendors, its own signals. You closed one logo. You inherited a hundred living, breathing accounts underneath it. And you know almost nothing about any of them. We fixed this for companies fifteen years ago. ZoomInfo, Clearbit, Demandbase, 6sense. Account data got clean, packaged, and dropped right into the CRM. We never did it for buildings. That's what I'm working on with drifteo, and it's what this piece is about....

It's Monday, so that means it's time for some band tales: We drove from San Francisco to Seattle to record our first album. Robert Lang Studios is tucked into a residential neighborhood. From the street it looks like a big brick house. Almost like a castle. You'd never know what's inside. We pulled up on a sunny day, which if you know Seattle, already felt like a sign. I walked through the door and it hit me immediately. The energy of the place. Nirvana recorded there. Foo Fighters. Soundgarden. Bands that shaped who I am as a musician. They stood in those same rooms, played on that same floor, recorded in those same spaces where I was about to sit behind my kit and make a record. I could smell it in the air. When we finished setting up and started warming up together, something came over the whole band. Nobody said anything. We just all got quiet for a second. The weight of where we were landed on us at the same time. I remember, Floyd Tucker, our lead singer belting into a microphone and the engineer saying "that's Kurt's mic." Kurt from Nirvana, we thought to ourselves? (Brian London & Chris Collins) There was this unspoken responsibility. To play the best we possibly could. To honor the room. We absolutely did. (Link to New Blood, recorded @ Robert Lang Studios in the comments.) More footage to be shared soon!

Cheee hooo!! 🤙

I'm noticing the CRE data moat is starting to crack. The winners from here won’t be the companies that hoard the most data, they’ll be the ones that turn it into the right action, inside the right workflow.

The more time I spend talking with companies that sell into multifamily, the more I keep circling a blind spot that sits outside all of it. The CRM may know a great deal about the account. It usually knows very little about what is actually happening to the physical properties that account owns or operates. If you serve the built environment, that matters.

Something most people in my professional world don’t know about me is that I’ve played in the same band, with the same group of guys, for nearly 15 years. We’ve put out three studio albums together, played shows around the country, and every year or two we get together to record at some pretty incredible studios. The crazy part is that we’re now spread all over the country. California, the Midwest, the Southeast. But we still get on Zoom and write music together. We all have careers. Some of us lead sales teams, manage projects, or run complex workflows in movie production. We have families. We have kids. Life is busy. But somewhere along the way, we made a decision that music was important enough to keep making time for it. Looking back, I don’t think I fully appreciated how much that commitment has shaped the rest of my life. It’s influenced how I collaborate, how I perform under pressure, how I think about creativity, and ultimately, how I am building my company drifteo. There’s a lot more to this story, and I think I’m finally going to start sharing some of it......

Out enjoying the water this morning when I realized I haven’t posted on LinkedIn in nearly 13 years. Holy smokes!!! By the way, the ocean temp here in North Carolina is around 85°F today, warm and glorious. Hope you’re having a great summer, wherever your adventures and the warm weather are taking you! 🤙