Between the Interviews - Introduction & Vision Reflection

The culture of a company is important. There's a popular saying that "people don't leave companies, they leave bad bosses." This has been true for me at several points in my career. I've even dropped clients in my own business because of the way they behaved. I've also experienced the opposite where I've followed a great boss to a new job and I've had employees in one job join me again later (and with the new skills and experienced they picked up the last time they were with me).

The folks I shout out in this episode are examples of strong contributors to a solid and appealing culture that keeps me as a returning customer whose dollar can be counted on by each of their respective establishments. I'll also strongly recommend each of them to anyone that I hear of looking for a new service provider. That word of mouth recommendation is FREE advertising. The more free advertising that's done for you, the more that leaders can reinvest in their companies and employees perpetuating this cycle of positivity.

In the two examples of negative experiences I had with former employers and bosses, I ultimately left. More specifically, I left willingly, loudly, and without an ounce of regret.

Culture matters. People matter. Values matter.

What I'm reading: Give Her Credit by Grace L. Williams

I'm not telling you what to do, but here's where I'm putting my dollar: Small business experts with hearts of gold. In the first Capitalism for Good interview with Shannon Masterson, we shout out two talented hairstylists that we are repeat customers of: Jen at Hello Gorgeous Hair Design and Madi at Helm Salon in Kansas City, MO. In this Between the Interviews episode, I also add a shout out to Demi at Lumi Skin Bar + Aesthetics. As my friend, Melanie, often says "let experts be experts." These skin & beauty experts combine inclusion and building others up in a such a positive way. AND they're good at their jobs.

Early and bonus shows as well as curated discussions and merch are available on Patreon.

More information at: https://www.capitalism-for-good.com/

Instagram | BioSite (with links to listen & more)

Transcript

Hey folks, this is the Between the Interviews show, where I'll provide some context, background reflections and recommendations associated with the Capitalism for Good philosophy. While the interviews are obviously focused on highlighting businesses and their leaders through talking about their experiences and philosophies, the Between the Interviews shows will be mostly me connecting the dots, providing some additional insight, spotlighting the things that I'm listening to, reading and watching in order to learn more, as well as some of the why behind where I am choosing to put my dollar. These Between the Interviews shows will be sprinkled in Between the Interviews and will be posted on the main feed, but will also be posted weekly on the Patreon in video form.So if that's your jam, head there. There's a link in the description.

Today, I'm going to do some reflection and some expansion upon some of the things that I talked about in the first episode of Capitalism for Good. It was the introduction put out prior to any of the interviews of business leaders being posted. And I'll kind of just like jump in to that.

I didn't really go in to the kind of personal aspect of this, of why this is important for me. I have always been someone that is drawn to goals, achieving things. I'm very focused on growing, learning new skills, meeting goals, meeting deadlines.

Like those are things that I, that's the way my brain works. I am someone who can gamify and challenge anything to get myself to just like get out of that and get moving and like having all of these like tricks and stuff that I do. Even like I love to be outside and to be active and if I'm on a run or a walk and maybe I'm like getting kind of tired, you know, this is kind of hard, I'll be like, I'll bribe myself and be like, okay, you're going to run to the end of the block and then when you get to the end of the block, you earn the, you earn the decision to continue to keep going for another block or so or maybe you slow down and take a walk after you assess how your body is or, you know, I'm trying right now to cut down on some food waste.

I travel a lot. I'm kind of all over the place and so realizing last year that I was throwing out a lot more food than I ever want to admit to. So I created this fun new challenge for myself that I was going to use all the things that are in my fridge and in my kitchen in my pantry before I bought anything else.

It also coincided with the big snowstorm that hit Louisville, Kentucky, actually multiple snowstorms. So it was also like, you know, an excuse to stay in and also like eat some different things than maybe if I was eating the same meal over and over again. Anyway, those types of like, I'd say trivial challenges are just the way my brain works and how things go.

So in a professional setting, that's also the way that I approach things. I love a goal. I love a shared vision.

I like knowing kind of where we're going, that we're all in it together. I wanna know the end goal and then I can like build backwards our foundation. And it's the way I approach everything.

It's the way I do some like consulting and advising work as well. And that's where I get like really keyed up about other organizations and companies and really trying to help them. I was like, okay, where do you wanna go? Where do you wanna be to be successful? Whatever your definition of that is. And like, how do we build you a roadmap? You can take detours, it can change, it can evolve as much as possible. But as long as you're generally going to the same spot, like you'll know generally how you're gonna get there and kind of breaking that down step by step. It's just like the way my brain works.

I say all that to say, there are two like really big examples, particularly in my adult life that I have come up against. In two different organizations, I'm trying really hard not to be too specific. I don't wanna call any one person or organization out.

Because again, things are complex and that is just not my purpose here. But there are two situations that have kind of like paralleled themselves together. And ultimately in both situations, my decision was to leave those organizations and to resign from my position because in both situations, it was just flat out, it was a moral difference.

It was an ethical difference and that I hold those things into really high esteem. I have certain kind of morals and values that I find really important and it's not worth it to me to try to separate those things. I understand that we are humans, we are complex, everyone has different views and thoughts and experiences and all of those things and people are welcome to those, especially in this context, those business leaders, those people all the way up at the top.

You are welcome to have those decisions, you are the leader and the driver of your respective companies and you have the right to conduct your business however you see best. And ultimately in both situations that I am kind of targeting right now, it was really clear that I was not aligned with them. One situation, it just got to a point where I was running out of potential ideas and solutions even trying to use every other tool in my toolbox resource at my disposal.

I was finding it really difficult to marry the needs and the desires of the client that I was working on the behalf of, protecting my team of people who were reporting into me, protecting them as humans and the stability and the longevity. I think that that kind of ties into the client's needs and priorities and the desires and priorities in support of the people above me. And it just became abundantly clear that those things were not aligned.

And I was, by nature of my position at that time, kind of caught in the middle. And it was no longer a good fit for me because I was, I couldn't figure out a way and I couldn't even envision a way in which they could all come together. And so therefore I was like, all right, well, I'm stuck.

Like someone else needs to try here because I'm not the best person for this because I'm just, I can't figure out a way to get all of these pieces in the puzzle to fit. In contrast with that, that company I had been with for many years and I had always had really great experiences. I shouldn't say always.

I primarily had really great experiences specifically because of the leaders and the mentors that I had and kind of the group around me from above. I had a ton of support. I was learning a lot. I got very honest feedback. I got very constructive, helpful feedback. But I was also kind of like given some leeway to be like, you're your own person. You have a good idea. We hired you to do a job, so do the job. So that experience, that's a stark difference between feeling super supportive, growing, changing positions, getting promotions, feeling like I'm learning a lot of things, and also feeling like I am making a positive difference.

You know, the saying that I say all the time is like, leave a place better than you found it. And I really like think of that in almost every aspect of my life, or at least I try to. And I really felt like that was lining up.

And then this other situation, granted, I was very young, I probably didn't handle things. Well, even, I mean, every situation, there's ways that I could have handled things differently. But similarly in this other organization that I was working for, it was the same thing.

When I, from an employee perspective, was there, I was growing, I was thriving, I was engaged, I was keyed into the things that we were doing. At that point, a portion of my job was public facing. And I was, I loved being able to go to clubs, and do speaking engagements, and give tours, and do question answers, and these kinds of things, because I was really excited about it.

And again, had a ton of support from the mentors, and the supervisors, and the bosses that I had at the time. We all had kind of a clear vision of where we were going. We were going toward the same kind of end goal, and it really felt really cohesive, and like a good solid team.

Again, in that role, I was able to grow new skills, do new things, test out different things. I just learned so much in that role. Then, much like the other situation that I talked about, in the end, what made me resign from that position was, I was like, my morals and my ethics and my values no longer line up with what I'm experiencing internally, and that's in direct conflict with what I'm going out publicly and presenting.

I'm saying this organization is so great and does so many great things for their clients, which I stand by. There were some really tremendously positive things that were happening, but internal, my personal experience started to, as my supervisors and the people above me changed, my personal experience changed, and not just in a hair personalities don't really jive kind of way, but in a true, like, hey, I don't think that our morals and our ethics and values align here. It's been a little bit of time since this situation, so I'll be a little more specific.

I don't necessarily want to name any names or anything like that, but I experienced toward the end, a lot of what I now look back on was like straight up like harassment, ageism, sexism, and just like flat out inappropriate behavior. Again, I was in a public facing position, and so I was engaging with the community quite a bit. One of the skills that I was learning was more like internal facing.

I was very young. At the time, and I remember walking into my office one day, which was next to my boss's office, and another colleague that worked in a different city was in her office. They call me in as I walk by, which seems great. They're engaging me, these people that are a step or two above me, or within my field, like co-workers, peers, thought that it was a good idea. They were like, hey, I heard that you were taking on some of the grant writing responsibilities. We had recently had some turnover, the woman that was doing that grant writing and grant management was leaving her position.

I was like, great, this is a great opportunity for me to learn a new skill. I got a passion for writing. It's something that I've always been told that I'm good at. I think that it's something I can do. I really love the verbal aspect of it. I bet I can put it in writing.

Let me take a stab at it. At least in the interim, if it doesn't work out, you continue to fill her position and that's fine. So these two individuals come again, hey, I heard you're taking on this responsibility, blah, blah, blah, and I come at it is so excited for this opportunity. I think it'll be really cool. I think I can do some great things with it moving on. And what I was met with was, well, you're young and pretty, so I don't know why we would be giving you a role behind a desk.

You should be out getting happy hour with the male CEOs in town every night. And I was like, oh. And so uncomfortable, didn't know how to handle it. On the other side of our offices is our head of HR. I'm sure that she's in support of it. I'm sure she's in earshot and she heard it. And just nothing happened. And I would go and I would try to talk to mentors and I would try to talk to people about it and I would talk to people in the community. But also, I'm in this public facing position.

I don't want anyone to, I don't want to present anything bad. I don't want to be perceived that I'm talking negatively about my supervisor. I don't want any of that to come back at me. I don't know, it was just, it was all uncomfortable. 

And then would escalate into, again, I am at this point a young woman in my 20s and like, you know, I'm dating, I'm doing all these things. And I would like, you know, come into my office on a Monday morning and have my boss straight up say to me like, how was your date with so and so person this last weekend? And I, and it would be like a first date that like nobody had known about. Like, how do you even know? And like that would progress to, I really need you to get yourself invited to that person's family dinner because we need their parents' donation to go up or their bosses or their company's donation, their sponsorship to go up this year.

And like, I'm sure you could do it. And then when I would push back on it and be like, I'm not gonna do that and I'm not comfortable with that. Also, how do you know that? I don't even know if I'm dating this person. Like, what are you talking about? Like, how do you know about this? Just so many things. And I would get like very serious conversations from my direct boss being like, well, I'm doing it. My boyfriend's blah blah, blah is donating blah, blah, blah.

You know, just like it became really clear that the culture and the environment that was being cultivated at that time was just something that I wasn't willing to do. I wasn't willing to blend my personal life and use that for like a monetary work gain. Even if the end result is like the client is benefiting because the client is getting more money, those were lines that I personally was never willing to cross. Still to this day, I feel very uncomfortable about it. I feel very uncomfortable about the people involved in it and all of those things. I say all those things to say, and those are just two examples.

I've witnessed, and especially as I've also sat on boards of organizations and done that consulting or advising, mentoring roles that I've done in the past. I've seen it while maybe not those two examples specifically, but I've seen all of these different things of just like, hey, my company doesn't value me. 

I have a friend who we were on vacation this past summer, and as she's flying in on vacation, she's on PTO, she is not working. She gets a phone call from her boss as she's flying out on vacation that says like, hey, by the way, we're doing this reorganization. And I don't really know what's going to happen in the next quarter, but we don't know what's going to happen with anyone's roles and that's it. And she just goes on to vacation being like, am I going to come back and not have a job?

And it's things like that, that while it seems like when we're talking about using Capitalism for Good and what companies have products that we're going to pay for and where we're going to put our dollar and those kinds of things, it's actions like that of like, I'm going to actually choose, I as a supervisor, I'm going to choose to pick up the phone and call my director report while she's on vacation not working and tell her, give her a courtesy heads up that she might not have a job when she comes back or in the next couple quarters and like she's not with her husband, she's not with her kids, she's got all these ramifications like she's sitting there being like how do I pay for XYZ's childcare if I come back and I don't have a job? She's like on vacation spending money and she's like, am I like, how soon is this? She doesn't have any of these answers.

That is a decision that that person supervisor made in that moment, to not value and consider that individual and what was best for them. That creates stress, that creates worry. I can only imagine that by the time she actually went back to work, that instead of actually doing her job and thriving like the skilled, talented, wonderful human being she is, she is probably like going to be preoccupied with talking to her boss and her coworkers about like, what are you hearing? What's happening here? Like honestly trying to deduce whether or not they have a job. I have another friend who is kind of going through that right now.

Maybe not to the extreme of getting a phone call while she's on vacation, but like as business leaders from the internal side of things, the way in which we treat our employees and our direct reports is important. And that has trickle down effects that go into even just if we're going to talk like dollars intense here, the cost of turnover. So if you lose an employee, then you are, that job still likely has to get done. Your employees remaining are going to pick up the slack and do that. They're going to get stressed. They're going to get burnt out. They're going to be stretched thin. So their other duties are not being done to the same quality caliber that they were being done before. You're spending time. You might have to spend some money to advertise the position. You're spending the time reviewing resumes, interviewing people, finding that new person. That could take, I don't know, every field is different. That could take a few months. Sometimes it takes a whole year. Then you get new employees and then you have to train them. Then you have to get them set up. That takes time. You have to get them equipment.

There's this transition period that also stretches everyone's thin, everyone thin. That has an impact on your budget. There are ways in which sometimes that can be beneficial, that kind of shake up, turn over, bring in new blood. Especially if someone leaves and resigns from a position in a planned way where you're like, all right, I know this person is going to hit the ceiling in this job. We can't really get him anywhere else for the next couple of years. I know in the next probably one to three years, they're probably going to leave. We're going to slowly prepare. Is there a way that they can train their replacement? Is there a way that they can set up some guides? And some training materials for the next person? There are some ways that you can prepare for it. And when people just get so frustrated, they just leave and shut down, that's costing you money.

That trickle down effect, if you're manufacturing an item, that trickle down effect, if you are spending more money on your overhead, your actual people there, that means that the cost of your item needs to go up in order to cover that margin. Whereas if you create more like of a stable, secure environment, get around some of those things, you can keep your cost lower, you can plan further ahead, you can let people know when costs go up, you can give them a heads up, like there's just so much that you can do to like get ahead and mitigate your risks. If you're working towards stability from like a people-centered way.

So I just want to like throw that out there. There's, while I think a lot of this ends up sometimes focused on like products and what companies are creating, especially from my perspective, like environmentally-friendly things. There's also this other side of it that's like, but companies are made up of people and people are the purchasers of things.

And like, let's just like all be a little bit better when it comes into that. And that has impacts on the dollar there.

One of the things that kind of made me think of specifically some of like the sexism issues that I have faced are those kind of like inappropriate conversations that I've experienced in my time. Well that's a little bit focused from the lens of me being a woman, a 34-year-old woman in 2025. One of the things that I've been reading that's been kind of like making me think and bringing these kinds of like thoughts and evaluations up as. I've been reading, Give Her Credit by Grace L. Williams. It's an incredible book. I haven't finished it yet, but so far it's really, really great.

It's about one of the first woman-run banks in Colorado in the 1970s, which is just wild to me that we're talking about something that is 50 years ago, that is within the lifetimes of like my parents and especially like grandparents and stuff like that. Like we're not that far removed from there just not being a woman-run bank in America. Again, things have changed, things have grown and evolved.

There have also probably been different pockets of the world where that's something that has never been an issue. I know there's definitely different cultures that are have less of a strong patriotic staple, the way that I grew up in the US, specifically in the Midwest. There are some of those underlying themes that just make up my own personal experience.

Reading this book really helped me reframe some of my thoughts. As frustrated as I get sometime, I recognize that I'm privileged to be in 2025 and to have had bold women before me demand that change to society and to make those changes that they're demanding with their own personal decisions. These decisions to start a woman-run bank, and this book opens up with the story of this woman trying to get a loan. She's given the opportunity to purchase the business that she's worked for for like 20 years or something like that. She goes into, I don't know, five or so, a number of banks that are owned and run by men. She presents her case. They say, uh-uh, actually. And in fact, one person tells her, you need to go home and have some children. Got a particular issue with that statement. Just personally, not to say that women that have children are not superheroes. They are, oh my God, you guys are doing amazing work with your bodies. And I just am very like in awe of that.

But then she, anyway, this woman goes to this bank in question and goes in and they say, oh, well, we also can't give you a loan. But we'll give you some steps to work toward how you can eventually do it. Like, let's give you, let's work with you to put you in a position to where you could be eligible for this.

And just that simple act alone to just like consider that. While that specifically is kind of like a woman focused perspective, I think it also can apply to just like a people focused perspective of like, all right, well, maybe you don't meet XYZ standards right now, that's fine. But like, how can we get you there? Can I, can I just like as a person give you some advice, give you some, some guidance that might help you? I just, I just think that that is super important. I found it very resonant. And if you would like to read it, I highly recommend it. Post that in the show notes as well. Okay, moving on, I guess this is kind of just like a big theme here in the segment.

I'm not trying to tell you what to do, but here's where I put my dollar. Again, I'm thinking a lot about like being a woman in society, and beauty standards and those kinds of things. I am not someone who is naturally skilled or talented, much like I don't have a creative bone in my body, so I bought things on Etsy that are created by other people.

I'm not a great beauty kind of person. I guess those things kind of go hand in hand. I don't have a good eye for that, but I have found other women who are. So I'm gonna shout out where I'm putting my dollar for beauty-wise. I get my hair done at Helm Salon in Kansas City. Madi at Helm Salon does my hair, and then I get my eyelashes lifted and tinted. I obviously am a redhead. I don't in my normal life wear a ton of makeup, but I like to feel a little bit put together, but I don't wanna do the work. But what I will do is pay Demi at Lumi Skin Bar in Louisville, Kentucky to do my eyelashes and take care of that and pay someone else for their skills and their talents.

That's also helping me. And also getting my lashes done in particular is just the ability to lay back and close my eyes for 45 minutes and have someone else do their magic, I think is amazing. So shout out to Helm Salon in Kansas City and Lumi Skin Bar in Louisville, Kentucky. You guys are saints and I appreciate it. And then, you know, I just as a reminder, I'm not an expert on literally anything. I'm still learning, I'm still growing, I'm still evolving.

So some of the questions that I still have that this made me think of is just in general, what's the average cost of turnover when individuals leave companies? And how is that cost passed out to consumers when service industries, going back to Lumi Skin Bar, like the cost of products in January of 2025 are going up. So the cost of that service is actually going up at a very nice, respectful email. There was like a heads up, this is going to go up. It's going to go up starting on this day. This is why it's going to go up. Very great. Love the heads up. Understand and we'll continue to go back. Thank you. Appreciate the transparency. Other questions, how do you handle a company seeming to differ from your morals and values or supervisors that might have different morals and values? That's a big question to me because in both of those examples that I pointed out here, I left. So what are your other choices rather than leaving? I'd love to hear about people who ended up actually making a difference by staying, maybe reversing course in some way or another.

I would love to hear about that and maybe kind of learn and grow myself. So all right then, that's enough. Let's go leave this place better than we found it.