847 Casey Cunningham:

Casey Cunningham:

One of the things that I learned is that you can spend too much time building product and not building your fan base. I realized I needed someone full-time dedicated to being in the market to spread the word and enhance the brand. So big mistakes, hiring somebody based on skill, not based on their values. Finding people that were not in alignment with who I wanted to be in the market and who I wanted the brand to represent, someone of high character, someone who cared desperately for the customer. And when I made those hires initially, worrying about their skillset and their capabilities, and can they sell? Can they present? I got really burned. I had some people that took money, that misrepresented us, that stole from the company. And so, I hire on character first today.

Hiring the right people and leading them to success has to be one of the most challenging aspects of any founding entrepreneur’s journey. Business is about people, and many of us like Casey Cunningham have learned the hard way as she built her $10 million business that the wrong people can spell failure. Who hasn’t made a hiring mistake? And who hasn’t learned the big price to pay? Today we get into all things recruiting, hiring and leadership.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of Podopolo, the AI-powered interactive app revolutionizing podcast discovery and discussion and making podcasting profitable for creators. I’d like to invite you to take a minute, download Podopolo from either app store, listen to the rest of this episode there, create and share your favorite moment with our viral clip sharing tool across social media, by text, or any messaging app, and join the conversation with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice … Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who has built a successful leadership and sales training business to $10 million in revenue, and to put that in context only 3% of female founders make it to $1 million in revenue.

Casey Cunningham is the CEO and Founder of XINNIX, and today she shares all here lessons learned as she grew her business – about recruitment and leadership.  While many people often revel in the success of others, most are not aware of the very painful processes they had to endure in order to achieve it. Casey says that the loss of her dad, also an entrepreneur, became the catalyst that pushed her into her purpose of continuing his legacy of business ownership. Casey’s company has helped 1,000 brands build high performance teams, empowered thousands of sales professionals, and leaders to achieve more than they thought they could, and has even won 25 workplace culture awards.

Casey will be here in moment, and first,

I know you love podcasts as much as I do, so what if you had an app that magically connected you to the exact right listens around what interests and inspires you and your friends – without having to lift a finger?  Podopolo’s AI powered recommendations and social clip sharing are just a few things that make it different from all the other podcast apps out there. Download Podopolo now – it’s free in both app stores – and if you have a podcast, get it featured on our home discover screen for free and access time-saving ways to grow your reach and revenue. That’s Podopolo.

Before we get going today, I want to share an update about this podcast. You know how we talk a lot here about how women entrepreneurs tend to over-give, over-deliver, and sometimes put themselves last? I’m so passionate about this mission to advance female founders, I’ve been delivering two episodes each week as I build my company Podopolo, itself an all-consuming task. So, I’ve decided to publish Wings only once a week moving forward – so I can continue to share the wisdom of amazing women entrepreneurs and be a bit kinder to myself at the same time. So, from today watch for Wings episodes to drop every Tuesday.

And now to our interview with Casey Cunningham, the founder and CEO of leadership company XINNIX. Listen on to learn why you should always hire on character rather than skillset, the best questions to ask prospective employees, and how to drive a culture of excellence and results.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Casey Cunningham and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo to check out Casey’s podcast “In Excellent Company” and also to share your favorite snippets of this conversation.

Melinda Wittstock:

Casey, welcome to Wings.

Casey Cunningham:

Well, Melinda, thank you so much for having me. What a privilege.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, I’m excited to speak to you because very few female founders make it to $10 million in annual revenue. What’s your secret?

Casey Cunningham:

A lot of hard work, a lot of amazing people around me. I have an amazing team. A lot of failing. I call it fail forward. We’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to make poor decisions. At the time, you think they’re great decisions, but you must just learn from them and just keep moving on. So I would say I have a great team. That is probably the great secret in order to get there.

Melinda Wittstock:

So there’s a bunch of things to break down there. I wanted to ask you though, when you first launched your business, did you have an intention around that 10 million mark? Were you thinking about that consciously?

Casey Cunningham:

Not at all. I think I opened the business with being incredibly naive, not realizing… I think most entrepreneurs who opened don’t realize quite what they’re into. But no, I did not have a 10 million as a financial goal. My first year goal, quite frankly, was 1 million, and I was able to accomplish that within a hundred dollars. So I thought, okay, I think we can do this. And then my next goal was five, now 10. Of course, my next goal is 20.

Melinda Wittstock:

As you’ve grown the business, do you find that your role has changed? And how has it changed? In other words, who are you being at $1 million as opposed to $5 million as opposed to $10 million?

Casey Cunningham:

Oh my goodness. It is a radical shift. At the $1 million, you’re doing everything. Literally, I’m sweeping the floors, I’m at the printer, I am hands-on building the infrastructure, hiring, leading, selling. I’m doing it all. When you’re an entrepreneur, you are everything, or you should be initially. at 1 million, I’d say I was doing everything. Over time, as I continued to hire key people around me, I started to delegate the things that I was not savvy at, from technology to marketing. So today, I’m definitely more in the executive role. I still go down and do some of the operations as needed on occasion, just because I have great instincts as to some things that need to happen. But today is much more vision casting, making sure the team is in alignment to where we’re going, and we’re operating in full throttle to make sure that we take care of our clients and that they’re raving fans at the end of the day.

Melinda Wittstock:

I mean, if you don’t have happy clients, there’s no way you’re getting to 10 million in revenue. I want to go back to the team though. A lot of women hire too late because we tend to look at hiring as an expense rather than an investment. What was your trajectory on that? How did you grow your team and what were some of the lessons you learned along the way?

Casey Cunningham:

I would say the number one advice today, now that I’m at that 10 million mark, number one advice for anyone is to make sure you assemble the finest team you can around you. I’ve made quite a few mistakes on hiring early on, where you can’t afford some of the top talent, or you think you can’t. And I would tell you, you can’t afford the top talent because when you look back and you look at people that could not execute the vision, you’d have to replace them. So early on, I couldn’t afford it. I just simply couldn’t afford it. And so I decided to self-fund, Melinda, which was after doing my business case and getting indications of interest from clients around the state and saying, okay, I’ve got a business model that’ll work.

I had a great business plan. I looked at what it would take to fund it and said, “I think I could self-fund this and get going quickly.” And so that limited my ability to hire as many as I needed around me. But once I hit the $1 million mark, I already had a staff but I continued to hire strategically throughout the years. And so I would say anybody listening in that is in the entrepreneurial space or in leadership period, is you’re only as good as your team,

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s so true. Going through those stages of entrepreneurship, and I’ve lived this a number of times, in those early days, you can’t really afford. It’s like, who’s around and willing to do it but they’re not necessarily the right people? And roles change and the demands of the company change, what you need from people. And so what were some of the lessons that you learned specifically just to give advice to people of like, because you got to hire on character. Entrepreneurship is not for everybody. A lot of people talk about it as if they know but they don’t. And so give me an idea of some of the early hires or where there were mistakes or what you learned and how you evaluate talent now. I like the fact that you said the word hire strategically, so break that down as well.

Casey Cunningham:

Certainly. Early on, one of the things that I learned is that you can spend too much time building product and not building your fan base. And so I realized I needed someone full-time dedicated to being in the market to spread the word and enhance the brand. I’ll share some mistakes because those were the learnings and how I’ve shifted. So big mistakes, hiring somebody based on skill, not based on their values. Finding people that were not in alignment with who I wanted to be in the market and who I wanted the brand to represent, someone of high character, someone who cared desperately for the customer. And when I made those hires initially, worrying about their skillset and their capabilities, and can they sell? Can they present? I got really burned. I had some people that I found out later from… And this is being very transparent, and I guess that’s where we all learned from, that took money, that misrepresented us, that stole from the company. And so I hire on character first today.

Melinda Wittstock:

100%. I swear to God, I’ve gone through all those. And my first company the financial person had a very sophisticated embezzling thing. I mean, she ultimately went to jail. I’ve lived that one.

Casey Cunningham:

Oh my gosh. Well, let me tell you, there’s nothing more painful. I’ve hired from people that were competitors that said, “Hey, I no longer want to work there,” and this is where you let the fox in the henhouse and you’re like, but are they really serious? And who are they? And then they came and then left and went back to the competitor. So trust is probably the most important part for me in hiring, and their integrity, because I know who I am and I know who I represent, and I just want an extension of me in the field and in the company, people that care and love and value one another. So my first questions to someone, and I learned this from an amazing leader, is tell me the three things you’re the most proud of. And I’m certainly hopeful that their first answer is family, that they immediately go to their family because that’s who I’m looking for, people that love and value their families, people that want to give back to others, because my company, Melinda, is dedicated to helping people become high performers.

And you’ve got to have a heart and a soul and a love for other people to help them elevate. And so over the years, as I’ve changed the questions, after the few times, and I’ll say few, unfortunately more than once, where I had a mis-hire. So as I’ve evolved as a company, that is the number one question. So I’m in the middle of hiring. So right now, which is funny that you’ve asked the question, what’s the most important? And it is hiring for character, one, skillset, for sure. Number two, what experience do you have? I’m looking for someone smarter than me in the field of what I’m hiring for, someone that I don’t have to tell what to do, that’s actually guiding me because I’m certainly equipped and have good instinct, but I’m looking for someone who’s been far more in the field of whether it’s technology or marketing or sales or operations, that has a greater skillset than I’ve ever could imagine.

Melinda Wittstock:

When you’re saying hiring for character, sometimes it’s hard to ascertain. I mean, you have a lot of people who… particularly in some roles, where you have marketing people, for instance, who are really, really good at selling themselves and they know what to say, but how do you really know?

Casey Cunningham:

Well, you know what, Melinda, I have a little rule when I’m hiring because I used to run HR in my previous organization. And of course, you’ve got all of the candidate questionnaires, here’s the things we’re going to ask. And I’ve learned over the years, the questions that you ask will determine your outcome and your answers or your decision points. So I have a whole bank of questions that are very revealing that tell me intently whether or not I’ve got someone of high character. I’ll give you an example if you like.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, because this is so helpful for people.

Casey Cunningham:

So for anyone listening in, so if someone’s listening and they’re in the middle of hiring, quite often, they may not understand behavioral-based questioning, because I ran HR, I’ll give you a quick understanding of that. Behavioral-based just means that I’m going to ask you a question that will actually tell me how you have behaved in the past in regards to a scenario. So then that forecast how you’ll become and what you will be in my company. So you want behavioral-based, which means scenario-based. Instead of saying, how are you as a team player? I mean, what recruit would not say, I’m really good, I’m exceptional, I’m great? They’re going to give you an amazing answer, and you’re like, okay. Well, let me change that. And here’s one of my favorite questions that is so revealing, Tell me a time you had a problem with a team member and how you handled it.

There’s a lot baked into that question because I asked you, tell me a time you had a problem with a team member, which means assumes you have had one. You can’t avoid the question. And if they immediately answer, and by the way, I got this answer from a recruit that I was close to hiring, and of course, I have my filtering questions, and she said, “Oh, I can tell you a time.” And she said it very matter-of-factly, “This other woman and I, we had a problem, and I finally got her in the office and we hashed it out for a good hour and a half.” And I said, “Oh, well, what would you do differently?” Because I’m trying to give her some grace. When she said, “Hashed it out,” it didn’t sound very appropriate to me. And she came back with, “Oh, I wish I’d had done it earlier because she…” And she just went on and on. So the manner in which she answered told me very carefully, from a culture standpoint, she’s going to have a problem.

She’s going to get into, basically, a fist fight, if you will, or an argument. She’s not going to adapt to our culture because our culture is loving, forgiving, caring, kind. We assume good. When we make a mistake, we don’t wallow, we move on. I mean, we fix it, of course. Those three words, tell me about a time, tell me about a time when you had a problem with a team member, tell me about a time when you had a customer service issue and how did you resolve it. Tell me a time when you had tremendous success in your last company, and this will help you define what they call success.

Tell me a time you were competitive. And when they say competitive, you’ll understand that… In my company, by the way, I’m looking for people who have that competitive gene. So it’s important for me as I ask certain questions, I am filtering for certain characteristics. I want competitive people that want to win. Tell me a time where you took care of a friend that was having a problem. Tell me a time. So that will help you to discern whether you have someone that you want to actually bring into your company based on just the questioning.

Melinda Wittstock:

This is so important but critical to know what you actually want, like, what is the culture that you are building and having clarity of that? So did you know that right from the get-go? I mean, you have this HR background, so It sounds like you knew what you wanted pretty early on, but not everyone does.

Casey Cunningham:

Yeah, it’s interesting, sometimes you forget to eat your own dog food. I say that crazy, where you don’t always follow your own advice. I have a number one rule in recruiting, and that is if you have any twinge of doubt in the interview process, move on.

Melinda Wittstock:

Everything you’re [inaudible 00:14:13] is things that I have ever made. I have overridden my own intuition. And that intuition isn’t necessarily loud. It’s [inaudible 00:14:25], it’s so quiet, especially if you have a very powerful analytic mind. But we all have this intuition and sometimes you just don’t hear it, or you allow other team members or you allow other factors or things to override that. But listening to your intuition is critical. And I can think of all the mistakes I’ve made along the years as a serial entrepreneur and all of them, pretty much, are when I’ve allowed myself to override my own intuition.

Casey Cunningham:

And as a female, we typically have a higher intuition or a sense, and we can quite see it more often, where we have that antenna, and leverage the antenna, it works. Your gut works. Listen to that little small voice that says, I don’t like the way they communicated on email or in-person. And if it’s small during the interview, it’s going to be magnified times 10 when they come work for you.

Melinda Wittstock:

What about things like reference checks as well, because some people are really practiced and good at this, even on the character, because they’ve read about your company and then they mold themselves to fit in to what you’re saying? Everybody has confirmation bias, so you going to want to hear, so you’re almost looking for… I don’t know, maybe this is just me, I don’t know, but overcoming that within yourself and getting third part deep reference checks, how deeply do you go on the reference check side of things?

Casey Cunningham:

The minute we get a resume, I’m going to go immediately and I’m going to Google it. I’m going to put it in all the search engines and I’m going to put criminal record. I’m going to put anything I can find. And I would caution anyone listening in, especially when… be careful on your social media, because we can quite often see way more than they probably want us to see.

So I’m looking for all of that before I even call a reference. Once I’ve got the resume and we’ve done some just quick due diligence out on the web to see… And by the way, I’ve caught quite a few that had criminal background. I can’t even begin to say. You know, you’ve been doing this a while. That they don’t think you’re going to look. And so I do go into reference checks. I do not do deep, a lot, dive because quite often, you don’t get much. The references they give you are already coached and you really cannot find out behind the scenes. To me, it’s more important during the interview process and the questioning. And as those behavioral-based questions that bank that I use will drive the character question, which is what I’m looking for first as I shared, so.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, because often the references that the prospective employee gives you are going to be friendly, but then sometimes you can get references because they want to get rid of that person.

Casey Cunningham:

Because I’ve done so many reference checks, if you’re really skilled at asking the references, the right questions, you can find out a little bit more. But quite often, right now, they’re shy to give you a lot more than you’d want, or give you what you want. So I’m not as big on the reference checks today as I am on the questioning.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, right. So you just have to get really good at that. And that takes time. It takes practice.

Casey Cunningham:

You know something else we do, Melinda, just I forgot to tell you this, is we do group interviews. One of the big factors for me in running HR in my previous organization prior to opening my company is I felt like if I do a group interview and I bring the respective people that are going to be working with the candidates and everybody’s in consensus that they’re amazing, nobody’s pointing fingers. And so they’re all cheering on the new employee. So I allow my employees to also be part of the group interview press. Even for executive leaders, if I like them and love them, I’ll include them, which is part of our culture, to let the team, not the whole team, obviously, you don’t need to, but a good part of the team that’s going to be working with them, interview them as well, and to give feedback.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. And you got to make sure that your team is going to tell you the truth on that as well. I mean, I had a really interesting thing earlier this year with my company, where I had a couple of team members after someone was hired, come and say to me, “I don’t know, my intuition is telling me something’s wrong with this person.” And I remember really listening, but like, “Oh, God, I don’t see it. What is it? But they proved 100% right about a particular individual.”

Casey Cunningham:

That’s a brilliant move. From anybody listening, I would highly encourage you to have other team members help you in the decisioning process.

Melinda Wittstock:

But also giving safe space because sometimes they think, oh, well, she really loves this person, so I’m just going to be quiet. She’s a CEO, she knows better than me. So how do you create a safe space for your team to feel that they’re able to do that? Because they’re nice people, they don’t really want to throw someone under the bus and they may be questioning their own judgment.

Casey Cunningham:

Sure, sure. And that’s all part of your culture. So if you don’t have a culture where there is transparency and where people feel comfortable, that it’d be a difficult process because you definitely want… If you’re going to give them a voice, they need to really have a voice.

Melinda Wittstock:

The other thing is the entrepreneurial culture too, because not everybody on your team is going to be entrepreneurial, otherwise they would, probably, have founded their own companies. So to what extent that you need them to have those resilient, nimble, fail fast, fail forward entrepreneurial attitude and how best to test that, or just another way of putting it is just being results drivers, that they’re not just here to do things. They’re here to actually have a specific result and return value on the investment. You’ve hired them for X number of dollars a year, what’s their return to the company? A lot of people don’t think that way. So how do you navigate all of that?

Casey Cunningham:

Well, I’m selective as to who gets to be in part of the group interview. There’s certain people that I believe are what I call the long-term associates, the ones that are going to stay with me for quite some time, and part of it, the group interviews I use as well as teaching them. And so they’re with me and listening to the questioning, and then I’m positioning how I interpret it and then looking for their interpretation. So I’m very selective. There’s some people that, as you mentioned, are non entrepreneurs. They don’t have good decisioning authority. I’ll call them my worker bees, amazing human beings that love what they do, who don’t want leadership roles. But if you’re in a leadership position in my company, then you should be worthy of being part of the process for certain positions. But the group interviews worked, and it’s been amazing. And sometimes five people will say yes, and one will say no, and we’ll overrule the number, the one that said no, because the majority ruled but everybody at least had a voice in the conversation.

Melinda Wittstock:

And for you, it’s really important because you actually run a leadership company. So the point you made about eating your own dog food is especially important for you, in fact, for all companies but.

Casey Cunningham:

Well, I said when I opened the company, Melinda, and I think you could probably appreciate this since you’ve opened so many, is like, I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. I was like, if I’m going to teach sales and leadership training and I’m going to impact culture, and I’m been really blessed, Melinda, I’ve won 25 culture awards over the years, and hopefully, that’s a testament that we do eat our own dog food.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s amazing. Congratulations. I just want to honor you for that.

Casey Cunningham:

Thank you so much. I’ve always wanted a place where people want to work and they love to work because you just get great performance. But we’re going to do life together, so let’s have fun while we’re having a major impact on the lives of other people. So that’s been a blessing. But my culture is very unique. And as a company that teaches leadership, I have to lead first, being the CEO, and make sure that we’re putting into practice the principles of what we teach our customers. And so the culture awards hopefully reflect that we are doing that, so.

Melinda Wittstock:

So what makes a great leader, a great entrepreneurial leader?

Casey Cunningham:

I’m going to say empathy for your people begins with that. Great leaders literally love their people. They care for them. It’s rooted in making them feel heard, respecting their perspective. A great leader communicates, sets a great vision, cares about their personal growth of their team members, and just really fosters a positive work culture where people do feel safe and they want to be creative and they’re able to execute their position. As I’ve shared with my leaders that are amazing, by the way, I’m so blessed by them, we are here to take every barrier away from our people to ensure that they can be at their highest performance.

Now, we do that by first loving on them, and loving sounds ridiculous. I’m using the word love and you don’t hear it often in business. But we teach leaders to have empathy and to take ownership of the outcome of their people. And quite often, leaders will take responsibility for their high performers, but they don’t want to take responsibility for their low performers. And great leaders will put their arms around both. And a great leader today, it’s obvious because people are lined up to work for them.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Casey Cunningham:

I learn to grow.

Melinda Wittstock:

Can anyone become a great leader or there are certain people that just have innate skills that perhaps need to be polished, and there’s always a learning, but-

Casey Cunningham:

Certain people have innate leadership skills and it’s easier to teach them on how to elevate their skillset. Some people are not meant for leadership, and I think that’s an important factor. Most of them, as an executive leader, I can tell you today, I know which ones want to be in leadership, which ones don’t. The desire for leadership, that’s where it begins. If you have a desire, you can learn the skillset. But it begins with the empathy.

Melinda Wittstock:

So what’s the difference between leadership and management? There’s a lot of people who come into it thinking… they’re leaders but they’re actually managers.

Casey Cunningham:

So a very distinct difference, a manager manages projects, manages priorities, manages things. A leader leads their people to accomplish these through managing the priorities. So I lead my people by casting vision, casting here’s the objectives, here’s where we’re going, and my managers are managing the activities. It’s a huge difference. You can manage activities and not be leading your people. Here’s how you’ll know, by the way, if you’re an amazing leader, if you’re-

Melinda Wittstock:

So have you ever had a situation where you’ve had people be passive-aggressive towards you on your team or undermine… or insubordination?

Casey Cunningham:

Of course.

Melinda Wittstock:

And how do you get used that? How do you deal with that?

Casey Cunningham:

So insubordination is the number one way to get fired, in my world. By the way, they call me Blade, short for blade. We have call signs in the company, it’s part of our culture, because I cut to the chase, get to the point, or they jokingly say, cut you. I’m like, I’m going to respect you and love you. I just expect that back. Of course, every organization’s had someone be passive-aggressive and do something that’s disrespectful. To me, it’s the intention. I’m going to measure your heart. If your intention was pure and it was sincere, fine. If you made a mistake and there was some intention that was ill will, then that’s room to let go.

Here’s one of the things that, Melinda, I think you can appreciate of what we teach, you get what you allow. And so you set the standard. Leaders set the standard. So really, really blessed when I consider the impact we’ve had. We have a transformational leadership program, Melinda, that’s 12 weeks long. That takes you through a series of exercises and understandings of what leadership means. And it begins with ownership. And once you own who you are as a leader and being an outstanding leader, the better you will be as a performer, so.

Melinda Wittstock:

Are there any specific challenges that female founders and CEOs have that are distinct from men in that? I know that soul, we talk about this on the podcast all the time, that women tend towards being perfectionists, which leads to control issues and micromanagement issues sometimes. We can tend to be people pleasers. Not from the perspective of what you’re saying about love, but more like letting things go because we just want to get along. There are all these kinds of things. Are there specific things that women really, in particular, have to be mindful of or where we have more challenges than men in leadership?

Casey Cunningham:

We do have more challenges. And the reality is I’ve learned from female leaders and male leaders of what it takes to lead over the years. And of course, as we teach it today, females as a general rule, because there’s fewer of us, there’s less to model. And that’s the gap because the men have been modeling each other for years, whether it’s right or wrong, it’s another conversation. But for women, when you see so few at the boardroom table and you’re trying to have a voice, you don’t know if it’s because you’re a female or it’s because you’re not leading properly. So women-

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly. No, you nailed it because you actually don’t know, like, is this person questioning me because I’m a woman or because I’m just not being a good leader? It’s hard to know.

Casey Cunningham:

Yeah. Melinda, I learned early on from my mother, I got a little Puerto Rican mother. She talk like this, “Let me tell you something, Casey.” And I lost my father when I was very young. My mother taught me… God bless her, she was widowed with five kids at 41 years old-

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh my God.

Casey Cunningham:

… on a school teacher income. Here I am, nine years old, feeling sorry for myself. Within eight months, lost my father, moved the house, lost my friends, all of the things. We’ve all got a story. But I had a strong mother who never let me look at myself as being a female, being a victim of any sort. Even when I was feeling sorry for myself, she would say the most powerful words. And this childhood, I’m going to say beautiful childhood of mine, has allowed me to speak to other women about their journeys. So who would’ve ever thought that I would have… Now I’m speaking, and it’s called the power of words and the three most powerful words for success, which leads to leadership, and it’s, I am responsible.

When I take responsibility for where I am and where I’m going, I win. When you’re sitting in that boardroom as a woman and you hear there’s an argument to you or to something you’re doing, we have to really be cautious to not look at ourselves because we’re female, but maybe we didn’t communicate well, et cetera. So I grew up in a man’s world. I was the only female executive in my last company, sitting in the boardroom table, talk about a fight to break the glass ceiling is an understatement. When I did break the glass ceiling and I was the only female, we certainly felt great about it, but I didn’t feel like the journey was harder than the guy that sat to my left or right. I didn’t know because I hadn’t been him. I just knew it was hard.

And I didn’t have anybody to learn from other than the men. And I didn’t always feel like they were leading the way I would want to be led, which caused me to build leadership development so that you’re strong as a leader, not as a female, not as a male, but as a leader who cares about their people and who helps build the success of companies worldwide. And the strength of that leader sitting in that role right now, whoever’s listening in, everything rises and falls on your leadership. Who do you bring aside to you? My biggest mistakes ever, Melinda, was bringing in poor leaders around me because they impacted the lives of my people.

So now I pour into my leaders more than anything to make sure that we are leading well and that we are exampling to our team what we teach in the marketplace. And that, I believe, is why we’ve won the culture awards, because we love and value our people, and we listen to them. I care about their kids. I know who their kids are. I know what their struggles are because they know I do care. Now, that’s a unique position for leaders. And I don’t know all my associates’ problems but I know my leaders do, and they have empathy. Doesn’t mean we take exception that they don’t have to work hard. We actually believe they work harder because we care for them.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. This is so important and tricky though too, in different types of companies, whether you’re fast scaling technology company where you had five people and then you had 10 people, suddenly you have 50 people and you have 100 people. You have multidisciplinary, you have got marketing people over here and the engineers over here. You’ve got all these different cultures and different types of people in those roles. And once you get into that middle management, and let’s get rid of the word management, you have the leaders below you and below them and such, how do you keep an eye in that fast scaling situation on who’s actually working well and not because some folks in that middle tier are really good at empire building or covering their tracks or reporting something different to you than to their team and all those? It just happens. It just happens more. And just one, there’s so many, I don’t know, books, pamphlets, podcasts, everything about this. One bad apple-

Casey Cunningham:

Yes, yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

… can cause so much havoc.

Casey Cunningham:

So you’ll appreciate this, Melinda. So I have something we teach and something, of course, we do. We have a list of what we call the non-negotiables of our company. And when you create a non-negotiables list, these are things that really define your culture and who you are as a company. The non-negotiables are the most important factor for when you’re scaling, because the minute you’re scaling, which I’ve gone through this, that’s when you start compromising who you are because you’re moving at such a warp speed and you’re hiring people at a warp speed that you could be compromising the future.

You create your non-negotiables, it shapes your culture. I’ll give you some examples of non-negotiables at XINNIX that have defined us, that my leadership team and my entire team knows all the non-negotiables, and we do a thing every year. I highly encourage this as well, and we teach this, is called the KISS method, Keep, Improve, Stop, and Start. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. At the end of every year, my team looks at the non-negotiables and says, what do we want to keep doing? What do we want to improve on? What do we want to stop doing? And what would we want to start doing? And you can do this as a smaller company, small teams. If you’re in a large company, you can have your departments do it.

But what it does is it allows the people in your team to help shape the culture. So example, power meetings are required in my company. What’s a power meeting? It’s where the manager, leader, if you will, meet with their direct report in a meeting every week to every other week, depending on how many direct reports you have. I do the same thing. I have a power meeting with my leaders, even though I talk to them every day, we’re in multiple things, and this is where we help set priorities. In that power meeting, I’m checking in, how are you doing? At the end of the year, this traditional, what we call, annual review, is literally, to me, passe, it’s old school. I’m not going to wait a year to see if you’re happy, and then to give you feedback.

I’m going to give it to you along the way to help guide you and bring you success and make sure that I am properly leading you. So every week to two weeks, you’re in the power meeting. The power meeting’s quite simple, how are you? What are you working on? What help do you need? And how are you feeling? And let’s go, let’s charge it together. Those meetings can last from 15 minutes to an hour and a half, just depending on how much you’ve given the respective associate and how much you’re meeting with them in between. So that’s a requirement. So the employees, we call them associates, and our employees, associates know that that’s going to happen. We literally just finished a large leadership program with an organization. We, of course, get feedback. One of the things that makes our company unique is we measure everything.

We’re looking for outcomes, results. This gentleman said, “I’ve been in 20 years in the business, I’ve never met with my people on a formal one-on-one the way that you suggested. I started doing it. I did it for my first two people. The third person said, ‘I heard I had to come in here.’ I don’t really want to do this but what do you have?” And he said, I talk to him every day. An hour and a half later, he said, “I can’t wait for these meetings,” because in the meeting, we teach you a three step process. How do you acknowledge them? And then what powerful questions must you ask? And what is accountability in that meeting and what does that look like so that they feel like you love and value them? Because by the way, accountability, quite often, has a negative connotation. It’s punitive, it’s bad. But accountability, if you shift the word from accountability to ownership, there’s four levels of ownership. And you want everybody at a level one, which means true ownership for the outcomes. So power meeting.

Melinda Wittstock:

So how do you discuss that with… on the accountability and results, like any startup or emerging growth company needs to be driven by results. And so take me through those four stages of ownership and how you articulate that and what they are.

Casey Cunningham:

So Coach K, was Duke basketball coach. He actually had four levels of leadership and of accountability, if you will. So as I take you through these, you can grab a pen and paper. It’s a lot of fun for you to listen in on this. I’ll take you through the four levels, and then as you hear it, you can go, how am I performing? I have a little fun here. I’ll do a little class example for you.

Melinda Wittstock:

Okay.

Casey Cunningham:

All right. So story about ownership. All right. There’s four people, Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody. Important job to be done, you want results. Everybody was asked to do it. Everybody was sure Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. So Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody’s job and Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done. Really familiar in an organization. So when you-

Melinda Wittstock:

My goodness.

Casey Cunningham:

So think about this, if you’ve ever worked for a boss or a company where there was true ownership and accountability, how’d it feel? It feels amazing because everybody is equally footed on equal ground. So the thought process, is effective leaders clearly communicate their expectations, but just communicating it isn’t enough, because when you just said, hey, how do we help people get to the results? I can communicate expectations, but you’ve got to get them to accountability because there’s a big difference between accountability versus ownership. Big difference. Accountability is being answerable for correct and being complete and delivering something, a task. Ownership is a state of empowerment. I own my company. Think about this for a moment, about a car. You’ll love this.

So, Melinda, think about a car. When you rent a car, an apartment, you’re accountable for what happens to it. But when you own a car or a home, you change the game. So those three powerful words earlier I meant to you, I said there’s, I am responsible. I’m responsible. So here’s the four levels of ownership. Level four, there is no ownership. So in this scenario, what Coach K teaches, if your team has a level four of accountability, which is no ownership, every player, let’s pretend we put a candy wrapper on the door, by the locker room in the door. Level four accountability, every player sees it and they ignore it, and they walk past it and nobody says anything.

Now, remember, good or bad, organizational cultures are determined by the worst behavior the leaders will tolerate. In level three, the leaders put out a policy, all trash should be picked up. Level three, the players only pick up the wrapper when there is a leader in the room. Level two accountability is where they only pick up the wrapper if another player is in the room. So that’s peer-to-peer accountability. But level one, none of the other players are in the room. The coach isn’t in the room. They pick it up because they’ve internalized the value and the standard that everyone has the ownership over the cleanliness.

Now, when you take those four words and you switch it from no ownership is level four, level three is top down ownership, number two is peer-to-peer ownership, and level one is I am fully responsible. Very few leaders are truly empowering their people. And so I don’t know if you heard, Melinda, so that’s the four levels, by the way. So level one is true ownership, and that’s what leaders, great leaders do, is provide ownership for outcomes without having to manage you, but I have led you.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. That was brilliant. Thank you so much. I think anyone listening to this podcast could take that and use it because if you look, honestly, at your company, and I was thinking, my goodness, literally, I’m going to borrow that for Podopolo. I mean, it articulated so well.

Casey Cunningham:

Well, we want everybody to have full ownership, whether you own a company or not, you have an ownership in your life and where you are and where you’re going and what you’re doing. And that speech, by the way, everybody always says, I use the word, there’s three powerful words for success. I didn’t say three powerful actions. I don’t know if you noticed that. Why? Why didn’t I say there’s three powerful actions? Because words have weight and meaning. Our words are dictating where we are today and where we’re going. And the words we speak to our team members are dictating whether or not they perform at the level we want them to. We set the standards. And if you want to inculcate ownership into your culture, you got to overcommunicate your expectations. You have to inspect what you expect. You have to empower your team members to solve their problems. And you have to include ownership questions in the hiring process. And you have to set the standard, and don’t move the goalpost. I find more leaders lower their standards as opposed to requiring people to elevate to their standards.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yep. Easily done. Especially when you’re in that busy, busy, busy, busy work. We talk a lot here about the difference between working on your business and in your business. We started the interview with the difference between you getting to 1 million, being at 1 million, being at 5 million, being at 10 million, and how you can have an entropy in a way because you get super, super busy where you just… the founder is focused on getting it done and is not investing time in all of this early enough.

Casey Cunningham:

And I’m smiling because since this is… we’re talking about female entrepreneurs for right now, plus I’ve got two children and a husband and a house and soccer games and all of the other elements, you have to be incredibly focused to be able to do it all. And I grew up saying, I want to do it all, and I am right now, but it’s because I’ve got great people around me. I have a great husband who supports me and is my biggest cheerleader and believes in me. And as he says, he gets to sell me. He used to work in the company years ago. But we’re just truly blessed, and when I think about what we do.

Melinda, one of the most important things, I hope the ladies that listen in to this will walk away with is as business owners, regardless of where we are, we are influencing other people’s lives. We’re for-profit. We want to make money. Of course, we want to make a difference, hopefully, but we’re influencing the lives of many. And I’ve always said when my people, and what we teach is when your people sit around the dining room table, if you want to know what your culture’s like, ask them what they say to their family members because those words around the dining room table are going to be the… that’s the culture that you’ve created.

Why do I care so much about my culture? Because the better my culture is, the better my engagement is and the higher my performance is. Now, ultimately, I do still care about my people. Of course, yes, I care, but I also know I want the very best around me, and I want us to have fun along the way and to make a mark on the world. And we’re doing that through our learning. But as the ladies lead today, remember number one, as a learning company, most companies want to teach skillset and they do training and development and professional development, but they miss the number one part of learning, and that’s the mindset.

If your mindset’s not in the place to learn and grow or the place to perform, you won’t win. And so we begin all of our programs with the mindset of success. What’s the difference between the goods and the grades? Why are some people better performers than others? And there’s only two factors that are different between the goods and the great, and most people don’t know that. And you have to study why you are where you are, and there’s such opportunity to help people get out of their own way.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. Oh my goodness, I have so many more questions for you, your whole backstory of how you got into leadership, other things you’ve had to overcome along the way. And we’ve talked so long about this. This is such valuable advice, Casey. You’ll have to come on again. But I wanted to ask you a little bit more about where your company’s going, who are the people that you work with, who are your ideal clients, et cetera. So we can talk a little bit about your business.

Casey Cunningham:

Oh, you’re so kind. So XINNIX is about energizing people and elevating results. XINNIX, it begins and ends with excellence. Everybody always wants to know where’d I come up with the company name, because it’s X-I-N-N-I-X. And if you think about, it begins and ends with excellence. And in excellence, anything is possible. You have to dedicate your life to excellence. So the ideal client for us is anyone who would like to grow. Now, that sounds a little bit too easy. Everybody does. You, hopefully. But companies and organizations that would like to have their leaders truly grow into transformational leaders, anyone who has a sales team that they would like to have higher performance, I literally just got the numbers from my team, from my last large group of salespeople. As we watch what’s happening in the market, there was 101% growth in eight weeks. That’s outstanding. And that’s what we’re looking for.

So anybody that values accountability and excellence, they’re absolutely a client of ours. One thing that makes us unique, Melinda, is we don’t just teach it, we have a system. And our system is training, accountability, and coaching, where we do real-time coaching as to who you are, where you are, and where you want to go. We hold you accountable and we will train you to the skills that you need to be successful, whether that’s in leadership, sales, operations, or we have clients that have literally done visits to our corporate office to see how we keep winning culture awards and really, really blessed by that. But what makes XINNIX different is we’re going to hit the mindset, the skillset, and the action set, and we’re going to measure the success, and we don’t let go until you achieve the success that you desire.

Melinda Wittstock:

So what is the best way, Casey, for people that could really benefit from your leadership training to find you and work with you?

Casey Cunningham:

Sure. Anybody listening, you can go to www.xinnix.com. That’s X-I-N-N-I-X.com. And, Melinda, if anybody mentions that they were referred to us from the Wings podcast, we are going to give 20% off their first engagement with us. So we want to say thank you as we want them have an influence for the ladies out there and the women that are working and that have their own businesses to help them in building transformational leaders and high performance sales teams. So xinnix.com, or they can call 678-325-3500 and just ask for a sales executive.

Melinda Wittstock:

Wonderful. Well, Casey, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Casey Cunningham:

What a privilege. Have a great day, Melinda. Thank you for having me on.