Advisers: Culture eats strategy for lunch

Culture is vitally important. I know this is debated back and forth but if you think about the best strategy in the world, you spend all this time, you build up your staff, have a game plan to execute against it. But then the F word starts being used. You know, the F word in my house, when my kids were growing up, we never used it. And that's the fair word. Things aren't fair. So if you can imagine a culture, yeah, break strategy; but immediately concluding the game plan or-- in two-day meetings, someone says, "Well, that's not fair. That part is not fair." That's a disastrous culture. By the way, you all have a culture whether by design or by default. And I think a lot more emphasis needs to be placed on getting people in an environment, the right sort of team players that say, "I don't have to go to work. I get to go, execute this wonderful strategy that I believe in and our whole company believes in." Can you imagine that saying "This isn't fair," versus saying, "What can I do to help?" just happen? Is there anything I can help you that you're working on today? First of all, you take a lot of time to hire the right person because one bad person in an organization can really be a cancer that spreads. So, we go through an exhaustive interview process. We use the DiSC analysis. We use the [unk]. We combine notes. We have a four-step process where we bring people in and actually vet them to make sure that they are fit. Then, it's really important we immerse people for the first two weeks-- they don't even look at their job responsibilities. Make sure they understand why we're doing what we're doing. We also share with them the Carson Wealth Client Bill of Rights and we make them part of being able to deliver that 'cause it's internal culture but it's also external culture. We have the Code of Ethics. And most importantly, all of our partners at Carson Wealth are part of setting our short-term performance objectives and our strategic objectives. So they have equity and the process makes for a very positive nurturing-type culture.