The Importance of Hiring and Retaining the Right People, with Lee Caraher

Episode 9: The Importance of Hiring and Retaining the Right People, with Lee Caraher

 

Lee Caraher is the founder and CEO of highly sought after communications firm Double Forte, known for producing great results with its innovative approach to traditional, digital and experiential programs. She has a long history of leading high-performing, multi-generational teams that enjoy working together. Lee is a champion for creating a positive workplace culture that fully supports its talent, even when they choose to move on. She takes the long view to support employees building their own personal brands that balance loyalties to themselves and their employers. Lee believes that companies able to inspire lifetime loyalty from employees — currently or formerly employed — are the companies that are best suited to thrive. She has long recognized that people will leave employers and understands the real problems this causes for companies.

 

What the podcast will teach you:

• How Lee’s career journey led to founding and leading coast-to-coast communications firm Double Forte, now 17 years old and thriving
• How and why Lee made the challenging transition from working for a major company to founding her own business
• What challenges Lee faced when she reached seven-figure revenue, and how she navigated those common challenges
• Why Lee’s business deeply cut into their expenses, slimmed down, and altered their business model to survive the 2008 recession and a loss of talent
• How Lee dealt with difficult staffing situations and a long period of losing new hires and being understaffed
• Why Lee struggled to understand her new Millennial team members, and how she learned to adapt her hiring and communication strategies as a result
• Why the ongoing staffing issues were exacting a high cost on the business despite ongoing growth
• Why Lee focuses on personal growth and on building and nurturing the right culture for her business
• Why investing in the people within your company can help propel your organization’s growth and success

 

Resources:

• Website: leecaraher.com
• Website: double-forte.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/leecaraher/
• Millennials & Management by Lee Caraher: https://amzn.to/2pKUzvZ
• The Boomerang Principle by Lee Caraher: https://amzn.to/2WUvlHB

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I have an exciting guest. Her name is Lee Caraher, the Founder and CEO of Double Forte. I’m excited to have you with me, Lee. Thank you for joining me.

It’s so great to be with you. Thank you for having me.

What I like to do with all of our guests is have you tell us a little bit about you and your business so we can get oriented that way before we dive in and talk about all the good stuff.

I’m the Founder and CEO of Double Forte, a national public relations and social media communications firm. We are headquartered in San Francisco. We have offices in New York and people scattered throughout the country, which is good. I moved my family from San Francisco to Wisconsin, so I am the lone person in the great state of Wisconsin. Although, I’m going to be hiring people because they don’t like being myself. That’s for sure.

Is that a big culture shock for you, or is the transition going okay?

It’s going okay. My parents lived here for a very long time. I went to college in Minnesota, but everyone’s been so welcoming. Our son, the reason we moved here, is off to a great start at school. So far so good.

You run a firm that’s literally coast-to-coast, with offices in the Bay Area and New York City. That’s big time, and now you’ve got offices in Wisconsin. How long have you been at this? We want to give a little shade to the audience here.

 

My company started in 2002. After 9/11, I quit my job at a very large international conglomerate. I wasn’t going to do that anymore. I had been on the flight one week earlier from New York to San Francisco and they went down. I was like, “I hated my work. It could’ve been me.” I talked to my husband and said, “I need to get out now.” He was not enthusiastic about that since I was the sole breadwinner, but he was very enthusiastic about supporting me in that decision. I started at that company after being at Sega of America, the video game company, for five years. I was the Vice President of Communications and International Relations there.

When it was a $1.5 billion company in this country, we launched over 250 video games and three platforms and so and so. Before that, I’ve been in agencies in Los Angeles and Boston. My whole career has been in public relations and communications. I don’t think anyone entering any profession expects to be in the same profession 30 years later, but here we are. I was very lucky to literally fall into it with my friend. I have a degree in Medieval History from Carlton College, and I loved the school and the topic, but what was I going to do with that? My friend, Ramona, said, “You should try out this PR thing.”

I’m like, “What is PR?” I read up about it and I was like, “That sounds good.” I was very lucky so early in my working life to finding something that I’m so well-suited for. My whole career has been in this profession, with many different industries and iterations. This company, Double Forte, is not 17 years old in 2019. We’re probably on our 4th or 5th business model because things have changed so much in the world of communication. I started the company before Twitter. We’re very much focused on how do we help good companies do great things in their categories and connecting our clients with the people who matter to them. That’s our core business.

That’s a wonderful journey that you took us through. Thank you for that. You’ve played on some large stages. I couldn’t help thinking some of the audiences were probably of the age where they were playing some of those Sega games. I got some attention there. PR communications on a large stage and you decided to do your own thing. You described the change after 9/11 and didn’t want to be in that rat race or the big company thing. Many of our readers have made this jump. They’ll resonate with this, from a big company to I’m doing my own thing. That was probably a little rough at first.

It was. In fact, it wasn’t my plan. My plan had been to take some time off, literally take a year off, and then figure it out. It was in 2001 in San Francisco, which was a brutal time to be in San Francisco after the NASDAQ implosion of 2000. My intent was I had been highly recruited to do this to go back into a company like Sega, where I could be in-house. That was my goal after about a year. However, I drove my husband crazy with my glue guns and my label makers. I had a moment where, “If you don’t go back to work, we’re not going to make it,” after a few months. I was exploring in-house positions when my mother, who lived in Wisconsin, where I am now, was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.

She was given 3 or 4 months to live. It was very clear at that moment that I could not take either of the jobs I was going to have to decide between. Literally, I was a week away from having to decide between two great and fantastic jobs, and I couldn’t have taken either. I have to be able to be with my mom and my dad during my mom’s illness. I withdrew from that job search. It became crystal clear within a week or two that I was going to have to be my own boss. I needed to have the flexibility to be wherever I needed to be when I needed to be there. I was not going to be able to pursue those in-house jobs as I had planned. With that in mind, I decided to start my own company and thought about how to do that. I’ve only been in PR firms until that point or in-house.

I decided that the course of least resistance is not changing my whole world by doing my own company. The goal was to do it differently so I wouldn’t hate it. That’s why I did not like it when I was in a big firm. This big company was very generous to me, but I didn’t like the work and what you had to do to be in that work. It graded against my soul. My friend Dan Stevens and I got together, and we said, “What if we had a PR agency that we like coming to? What would the conditions need to be?”

In a bad economy, you have to say no through yes. Click To Tweet

We scoped it out on our whiteboard and started the company together. He was my co-founder. He has left the company twice. He left the company the first time because he thought he was not going to be in PR. He wanted to be in the kitchen in a restaurant. He realized he didn’t want to be in the kitchen, so he came back, and then he left again four years later after that. He has been in a very large PR firm, not in the ownership positions. There we go.

Your path showed up out of necessity. You need flexibility and to be able to do this with your parents for a time, so you started a business. What was your biggest concern about going out on your own, other than maybe the typical stability type of thing? What did you think you might not be good enough doing as a business owner?

I had started a business for this big international company. They’d asked me to start a company, so I was very fortunate to have started a company within another company where I learned a lot of things.

You already had some good scar tissue from that.

I had some scar tissue, but I also had the safety net. They weren’t going to let me fail in terms of being out of a job. They would have let the brand fail. That’s a P&L and a brand within the billions of dollars company. They had trusted me to start a new company and put resources behind it, but I made some mistakes along the way there. I started this company with two nickels on a dime, knowing what I was good at in operations and what I was terrible at in operations. I wasn’t worried about getting clients because I had clients that weren’t be a problem.

I wasn’t concerned about that at all, probably should have been, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t concerned about knowing what to do because I had done some of that building stuff before from a company perspective. That’s what we do for a living. We help companies become known. The operations of how you make sure that you’re running a company that pays the bills on time is what I was worried about most. In fact, I hired my CFO before I paid myself.

Pretty early on, you hired somebody to help you with the financial piece.

 

Oscar started with us probably in month two.

That would be atypical for most of us.

It wasn’t full-time at all. He was an hour here, an hour there. Between 2002 and 2005, he went from an hour here, an hour there to full-time. He was more of a controller than a CFO, but he could put all those hats on. He managed all of the finances, billing, rectification, paying the insurances, and all these things. We were heavily insured early on and able to do it because Dan and I didn’t get paid for the first six months of the company. We were paying other people, but we weren’t paying ourselves.

That can be a hard road. As you may recall, our readers are typically going to be seven-figure business owners who’ve had some scaling challenges. You’ve been through a lot of those same challenges. Thank you for sharing your story but let’s fast forward to the point where you crack that million-dollar mark. You got a steady operation going. You know how to get and keep customers happy. You’re learning some new things, which may be for you coming out of bigger business with some leadership responsibilities wasn’t as big a transition, but let’s talk about it anyway. If you can think back to some of the seven-figure growth challenges you experienced as you guys pass through that million-dollar mark. What became bumpy for you guys?

The business model that we started was to hire people only who had ten years of experience and not to have any junior staff who we were training. The benefit of that was one, in 2002 in San Francisco, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting 25 people who were qualified because no one got hired in PR between 2000 and 2004. The downside of that is it’s very expensive to do. The margin was not good, but at the same time, we got so much more work done. We got to $1 million in the first two years of the business pretty easily because of our reputations. We were able to command a lot of great talent who wanted to work with us. The challenge came in 2008.

In 2008, we were probably at $2.5 million time. Basically, my business was selling time. There is no multiple in the business. We value our hours or FTE or whatever it is. There are not a whole lot of margins on the sides. There’s nowhere else to get the margin from. To get more margin, charge more per hour at the very end. In 2008, we were eighteen people going into the fall and things were starting to get a little bumpy on the road in the economy. We were pretty solid at a good margin, our clients were happy, etc.

I am sitting at my son’s horseback riding lesson on a Saturday, September 13th, 2008. I remember this well. I was thinking, “I worked my butt off for six years. I got a great team, we got a good steady income, and all these contracts are good. I can work for four days. I do my 60 hours and 6 days instead of 7 days as an entrepreneur.”

Know when it's time to change your business model. Understand when you can't keep going on the way you were. Click To Tweet

On a Sunday afternoon, I remember moving things around and going, “I’m going to delegate this. I’m going to do that this year so that I could take Wednesdays off and start riding horses again.” Monday morning, September 15th, 2008, by 10:00, I was like, “I’ll be lucky at five days. I’ll be lucky at 8 days a week, 24 hours a day.” That was the day that our economy teetered on the edge. Oscar was at his other job. Oscar is my CFO. He was 2/3 with us at that time. I was like, “Wherever you are, get up here now.” He got there within an hour. He was already there by 2:00 and we’d stayed until probably 8:00 or 9:00 that night.

We went through every single account, receivable, payable, and everything to see what our situation was. We realized we’re probably going to lose four clients because they were all looking in startup land in San Francisco. Two of them were in World Trade Center II looking for money. They got out, thank God, without being harmed, but we thought we would lose four clients who would run out of money fast because there wasn’t going to be any liquidity in the market for that. We thought that our other clients would probably retract a bit. We modeled everything and said, “The first thing to do is how do we make sure we’re good on the payroll.”

The first piece was the cash issue. We killed parking and lunches. We took all the expenses out of our business except for salaries, healthcare, 401(k), and bottled water. We were able to scrape probably a couple hundred thousand dollars off the run rate right there. The next day, we worked with our team leads on what we thought was going to happen. Wednesday, September 17th, I had a meeting with the whole company. I said, “This happened. Number one, whatever the business model coming into this situation is not going to be the business model that we’d get out of the situation with.”

“I don’t know what that business model is going to be. We have to wait. We’re going to figure that out later. The most important thing right now is that we want to keep the team together. We want to retain our clients and maintain our income. We’re going to lose these four clients and this is what’s going to happen, so and so.” For six years, we were $2.5 million and people were getting pretty comfortable like, “I don’t want to do that work.” The answer is no. It stepped up clients. I said, “The most important thing right now is that everyone you have to say no through yes. If the client hears no in a bad economy, they will go somewhere else because there are a plethora of PR firms in San Francisco,” and they’re all going to be hurting.

Every single one of us is going to be hurting in exactly 24 seconds if you’re not in a high service mentality where no could be the answer. What the client wants to do and what you think is right could be diametrically opposed. To say no out of the gate is the wrong answer because the client is going to hear no instead of a solution and will go somewhere else.

The first thing I said was, “We have to 1) Dropped all these costs, and 2) We have to get to know through yes, and no is no longer an answer. It could be the right answer, but we’re not going to say it that way. 3) We’re going to buckle down, focus on every single client, and what is the most important thing for their businesses to keep going in this situation.” It’s because many were the retail somewhere. It’s all over the map, so I put the business model on the back burner. We got through September, October, November, and December 2008, and then we did lose folks for clients. We won a couple of clients. We came out net ahead.

In early January of 2009, anybody who didn’t move their mindset from no to yes, I cut from the business, so we were understaffed for a while. I started looking at the business model, and the business model was we can’t keep going on the way we were. There’s no margin in this business. We’re counting on people who have ten years of experience to a very high headcount, and we’re going to run out of people with ten years of experience because no one got hired from 2000 to 2004.

 

My philosophy is you always want to bring people in at the least qualified perspective in your company. The only qualification was that they were good practitioners and they had ten years. There weren’t going to be any people with ten years of experience very soon. We started changing the model so we would hire young people. I hadn’t thought anything about that because I had been good. In the last two companies, I had 750 or 700 people, and probably 80% of them were under 30. I was known for getting and retaining great talent. We started hiring this thing called the Millennial, which unless deep-six our business because we were not prepared for the different generation of workers.

You made it through the recession easier than you made it through the change in talent you were hiring. Let’s talk about this. It’s not news to everyone that there is a difference. What did you experience? Tell us about the gory details of some of that pain.

The first person we hired was 24 or something like that, who’s early on in their career was fantastic and smart. The first day she came to work, I was late to the office that day because I had meetings in the morning. I walk in and there’s a dog in there. I’m like, “What’s this dog doing here?” This is 2009. “That’s Stephanie’s dog.” I’m like, “Stephanie, the new woman?” “Yes.” “Did she ask if she could bring her dog?” “No.” “Did she tell us she was bringing her dog?” “Nope.” “Is anyone allergic to dogs?” “I don’t know.” I’m like, “Let’s find out if anyone’s allergic to dogs first,” because the dog had a red vest on, a service dog. She did move the dog with a water filtration system, a kibble dispenser, and a bed. This dog was here to stay. They explained to me that this was a service dog.

The dog was a Chihuahua. I come out of my office a few hours later, and there’s no dog. I’m like, “Where’s the new girl?” “She had to leave.” I’m like, “It’s 3:00. What do you mean she had to leave?” “She won’t be here tomorrow either.” I’m like, “Did she ask if she could leave early? Did she tell us she needed to leave early? Where did she go?” “She went to San Diego to see her mom. She’ll be back on Wednesday.” I get on the phone with some of my friends who run other PR firms in the city. I’m like, “This happened.” They were like, “I thought you didn’t hire young people. I thought you didn’t have any Millennials.” I said, “What a Millenial?” “They’re terrible.”

I was like, “They can’t all be terrible.” “No, they’re all terrible.” Literally, this was the drama that I was hearing. I was like, “That sounds ridiculous.” The woman came back to work on Wednesday. We had a little chat and we got her on a scale. Within a month, I had 6 or 7 service dogs in the office because she ran the side business, getting red jackets for everybody. She was a great performer and so smart.

A year later, we hired 6 Millennials within 8 weeks of each other. Within three months, they were all gone. We’re a small company. I think we were 30 people at that time. We went from 30 to 36, and they were all gone in three months. I never in my career had 100% failure on people ever. One person could have been a bad hire, but we did not make six bad hires. There’s no statistical possibility that we’ve made 6 bad hires, but we walked 1 person and 5 quit. I’ve definitely felt it as a body blow.

Because it happened all at one time, it hit me upside the head. I started researching and everything I found out about this group called Millennials, which I hadn’t clocked in my head until then, was so negative. They’re like the pariahs on the planet. I said, “This is statistically impossible that 80 million people are all entitled and don’t know anything. It can’t be true.” We hired freelancers who cost more so we can get the work done before we hire new young people. I did a lot of my own research, interviews, and all this stuff to figure out what the heck we had done wrong.

Everybody needs leadership. You may know what to do, but you need to know where to do it. Click To Tweet

It’s not that we weren’t terrible people, but we definitely weren’t framing the workup in a way that could be understood and appreciated by a generation that had never printed anything out. They didn’t understand what end-of-day was because they were 24/7 people, and deadlines didn’t mean as much. We trailed the narrative until we figured it out. This is 2011 and 2012. The average tenure for someone under 30 in San Francisco is 13 months, which is brutal on your bottom line.

Let’s draw some of that paint out. Why is it brutal on the bottom line?

It takes six months to a year to get somebody clicking, any single business if you’re experienced six months before you’re clicking on all cylinders in a company with the culture and ways to do things. A year if they’re younger and don’t have a lot of business experience and are learning how to be an adult at the same time. That was my experience always. The 1st year, we’re going to get 50% out of them, and the 2nd year we’re going to be 90%. We’re in utilization land in our business. We’re tracking time, all that stuff.

In general, 2nd year and 3rd year, if you’re at 90% utilization, that’s good. In the city, people were losing people at thirteen months. At 13 months, you’re at 50% utilization, then you leave. The next time you get someone, there’s another year of 50% utilization. Plus, the time you lost from having to cover them. Plus, the money you might’ve spent to either hire freelancers to do the work or temps or whatever and if you’re using a recruiter, you’re watching the drain off the bottom line and the time where you could be much more productive to go into treading water.

What happened to your revenue growth from 2009, 2010, to 2011?

We are moving up. The only reason we needed six people is because our revenue was growing from $2.5 million to $3.2 million between 2010 and ‘11. We experienced growth the whole time but the margin was low.

I’ve asked you about profit. That might be a different picture. We don’t have to get into the specifics.

 

Because we had younger people, our new model was predicated on younger people. The model was blown out of the water when six of them weren’t there anymore. My mindset is that if you don’t have the youngest generation in your workplace, you don’t have a future in your workplace. It is my point of view. If you’re not growing your own talent, my experience on that is don’t count on anybody else to grow your talent because, particularly those of us in the service business, we have a certain way of serving.

Because someone is known to be a good practitioner doesn’t mean they’re a great service person. My belief is if you can be a good results person and an excellent service, you will never lose a client. If you’re excellent results and okay service, you’re going to lose the client. If you are terrible results and excellent service, you’re going to lose the client. The winning combination there is excellent service and good results.

You’re picking work up of people’s shoulders, not creating work for your clients. If you can have both, excellent results and service, you’re golden, but that is very hard. Excellent service and good results are hard enough. Excellent and excellent is harder. Don’t count on other people to train your people. You’re going to have to train them to your own service standard no matter what.

If you don’t see the need for these future capabilities in your people, you are short-sighted on that. You’re saying you got to develop people and start them. Not like you have to hire a young and inexperienced. Even if they have experience, they have to learn your way, so you learned some valuable lessons.

An error I made early on was I thought if I hired people with ten years of experience, they would know what to do and didn’t need leadership. That was a total fail. Everybody needs leadership. You may know what to do, but everybody needs to know where to do it. Everyone always needs leadership. From a service business perspective, the way that the economy has been floated where there are holes in terms of the need for people versus the education of people.

If you’re in the top 25% of your category in terms of performance, you’re always looking for those top 25%-ers, and you’re going to have something special about what you do things. You don’t know the people to do them the way you do. Every time someone comes into your company, you can get better by what they bring to the party. I don’t want to discount that. The reason it almost killed the company was because I had to hire all these very expensive contractors to service the work we had done. It was very expensive and the margin was terrible. Everybody tells you cash is king. I cannot tell you that hard enough.

We usually call it don’t run out of money. I like to call it secure fuel for growth. Cash is king. You got to have it.

When you have a culture where a millennial can thrive, everybody benefits. Click To Tweet

I didn’t worry about the business at all until that moment in time. That was 2012. I wasn’t worried about getting clients at all and doing good work. I wasn’t worried about learning new things because I started the company for Twitter and social media is part of our workflow. I’m a personal learner. I have to learn how to find people who are learners because not everybody is a learner.

We went through a few things. When we were hiring the young people, learning how to frame the work up in a way that was motivating, I found a few things. One is when you work and have a culture where a Millennial can thrive and have high performance, every single person benefits from this. I wrote a book out of that experience. I think we talked about that earlier. My clients had the same problem.

They were like, “What about these Millennials?” It’s a frame of mind and reference too. The second time it was so hard was when I was working on my succession planning. There wasn’t anybody in the business to take over for me. I hired someone who I thought would take over for me, a very expensive body. I held on to him much too. That is my downfall. I hold onto people longer than I should when they clearly should go. I’m working on getting better at that over time, but I hired this very expensive number two body who was intended to become the president and then take over the company. He lost all of his entire book of business in the same week without any warning to me. That was obviously a bad week.

All signs point to no. The people in our business are where we’re selling people’s skills, time, experience, and a certain value of that time. When the time ends up unvaluable and worth less than nothing because they have lost their business, there’s no way to recoup it. You’re at a loss. Those are the two times that have been the most around people, either not paying attention to what they needed or not, or trusting too much in what they were doing, which is my personal downfall.

I want to zoom out a little bit and draw out some lessons that I heard. I want to underscore some of them. If we zoom out, I heard you say cash is king, but I didn’t hear most of the lessons around that. An endorsement that, “We all know this is true. It was definitely true for us.” What I heard was that the biggest seven-figure growth challenges you experienced were around people, leading people effectively and attracting the right people, and leading up your business in a way that they felt part of it. There was motivation there.

It’s interesting to me, and you probably share a similar point of view, that most business owners don’t point to the people and challenges as the thing that’s keeping them from growing. They usually point to sales or marketing, or if it had a better data system or whatever. There’s always some technology, process, or tool that they’re reaching for to help them grow. My experience has been it’s their personal growth as a leader that then enables them to go where they need to go.

That has been mine as well. The thing about searching for the tool is you got to have someone who knows what the heck the tool is and how to get the most out of it. That’s a person, and that person has to be part of a team, have to belong to a team, and wants to be on the team. A top 25%-er doesn’t want to be around people who are not top 25%-ers. You’re only as strong as your weakest language. It sounds so cliche, but it is so true. Everything had been going well, and then someone forgot to close the door and the dog got out. I’m like, “There goes the star of our show.”

The best example we have around people right now is Uber and culture. The best cultures are the ones where the people are A) Getting along, B) All pulling the oars in the same direction, and C) Not in conflict. When you are doing those things altogether, you can hit a flywheel on productivity. Uber was able to hide its productivity disasters because they had so much money invested in them. There was an incredibly toxic culture where people were coming in and coming out all the time, where women and men felt that they were at part being persecuted and at physical risk in some places.

It wasn’t until the company was trying to go public when they were going to have to talk about how actual their financial performance. That’s number one. Two, it was big enough where all these bad people practices started spilling over into actual consumer experience with the brand. Can you imagine if this company had millions and millions of dollars of funding, had a good culture, and didn’t have to worry about protecting itself at every single place because they were going to get exposed and have to pay people off?

Can you imagine where they’d be and not underwater for the next decade? If they ever become profitable, light years of difference. That’s the most extreme example. Productivity and performance are all about people who are invested in their day, like and respect who they’re working with, understand that they have a role that matters to other people, have a low tolerance for crappy work, and they all have to work together.

You need to have high performers who want to perform well and want to perform well together. That’s where the highest productivity, the highest performance, and profit comes from. Anytime you don’t have that thing, where you have people who don’t want to be together. People who don’t care if it’s a high-performance or not, people who are backstabbing each other, you are watching dollars go off your bottom line every single time. It may look like time or dollars because you have to pay people off. Any single time you spend an extra hour on that crap, you are losing money.

Much wasted motion in a company like that where you’re not all excited about a purpose there into and there’s any chaos or confusion about who’s doing what, or we don’t like each other. Sometimes, as business owners, we think of that purpose, values, and mission. All that stuff is soft or it doesn’t matter.

It’s the hardest thing to do. There’s a lot of data on Millennials. They want a life and a job with a purpose. It makes a lot of sense given who their parents were and then you think about Gen Z. Gen Z, in general, as a group is at this age, much more worried about their financial stability than their Millennial compatriots at their age. There are a lot of reasons for that, which we don’t have time to talk about. They, too, want to know that they matter if it’s a tight job market and all those kinds of stuff. The new definition of business is not driving shareholder value. It’s driving stakeholder value. The business round table redefined business for us earlier in 2019.

They did that because they’re watching how much money is going off of everybody’s balance sheets in the form of people who don’t want to put up with it anymore because high-performers do not have to. If you’re in the 7-figures going from 7 to 8 figures, whatever it is, or you have a widget or sell time, people are the biggest propeller of growth or death.

This has been a fantastic conversation, Lee. I could listen to you for hours myself. Let’s wrap up with you telling a little bit more about your book. You obviously have a lot of passion and expertise around this culture stuff. Tell us about your book. Tell us how people can find your company, Double Forte. How do we connect with you? What do we need to learn?

I have two books. The first book is called Millennials and Management: The Essential Guide of Making It Work at Work. It was published by Taylor and Francis. My second book, also published by Taylor and Francis, is called The Boomerang Principle. It’s the strategic advantage of rehiring people who have left you. The flywheel that you create when you rehire former employees. It’s all about culture. You can find both of those books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and where you find books. You can find them on my website, LeeCaraher.com. That’s where you can find me speaking about these kinds of culture stuff and business. For marketing, public relations, and social media, you can follow my agency at Double-Forte.com. We blog there as well about all things communications, social media influence, and crisis.

PR, communications expert, culture leader, expert, what don’t you do?

I don’t make dinner.

You’ve been a wealth of knowledge for us. Thank you so much for giving us so much from your own experience, all the things you’ve learned as you’ve scaled your own business now. It sounds like you’re helping lots of others to do the same. Thank you again, Lee. It’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on our show.

Thank you, Brett. It’s an honor to be with you.

 

Important Links

• Double Forte
• Millennials and Management: The Essential Guide of Making It Work at Work
• The Boomerang Principle
• LeeCaraher.com
• http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/LeeCaraher/

 

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