In today’s competitive business landscape, having a great product or service is no longer enough. The secret weapon of successful companies lies within their walls: a thriving company culture. But what exactly is it, and why does it matter so much? In this episode, Bill Harney, the esteemed Owner and Executive Advisor of Keeping Current Matters, explores the critical role of a company culture in driving business success. He delves into the experiences of KCM in achieving remarkable growth by prioritizing a positive work environment. Discover the key ingredients of a strong company culture and its benefits, from boosting employee morale to attracting top talent. Learn how to unlock your team’s potential and watch your organization flourish!
What the podcast will teach you:
- The definition and importance of company culture
- Benefits of a strong company culture
- Building a strong company culture
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Unlocking The Door To Success: Why Does A Strong Company Culture Matters With Bill Harney
We bring guests every episode who have been there, done that when it comes to scaling their businesses. This show is dedicated to those of you who are out there in that seven-figure journey. You’ve cracked that million-dollar mark. You’ve got your eyes set on $10 million. You’re like, “I’ve got more in me. I’ve got to be able to grow this thing.” You’re bumping into some challenges. Hopefully, you’re finding some inspiration and some great ideas here on this show.
Every guest we bring has some great perspective on this journey and our guest is no exception. In fact, guest is a rare repeat guest. We haven’t done that very much on this show, but if you look back at our very earliest episodes, you’ll see the name Bill Harney. I’m pleased to welcome Bill back to the show. Bill is a Cofounder at Keeping Current Matters. At KCM, as they are usually referring it to, they provide critical market information to folks in the real estate industry who are trying to help buyers and sellers figure out what’s going on in the market, help them make the best choices possible. Welcome to the show, Bill. I’m glad to have you back.
It’s so great to be back, Brett. One of my favorite things to be able to do is spend time with the community that you’ve built. I come from this community. I owe a lot of my success to the work that you’ve helped me accomplish in my life and my career and with my business. Talking to you and talking to folks that think like the both of us is one of my favorite things to do. I appreciate being back. It’s an honor.
It’s totally fun. Please correct me or add to what I did in my attempt to introduce KCM a little bit. Tell people exactly what it is so that we’ve got some good framing as context for who you are.
I think you did a great job. To add a little bit of context, so we are a digital subscription service focused on the residential real estate market. Our job is to be able to help real estate professionals understand what’s happening, why it’s happening and be able to recommunicate that back out to their clients, buyers and sellers, both sides about what’s most important going on in the market. There’s a lot more that goes into it. At our core, that is what we do. We’re based here in Richmond, Virginia. We’ve got a shy of 50 employees. It’s been a long run to get to that point. I’m loving life and having fun.
I’m thinking back to the time that I first heard the name Bill Harney and when we first talked over a phone call, because Zoom wasn’t a thing, it was many years ago. I believe it was 2014. I might have that wrong, but you’re in a much different spot. Your father actually had started the company and you were at the beginning stages of stepping in and wanting to do more with the company that dad built and grow it into something amazing, which you have done. You were fairly green as a CEO, as a leader and trying to figure some things out. Fast forward many years later, your business is at a much bigger, better place. You’re at a better place. You’ve grown, you’ve learned, you’re so capable. It’s fun to see, looking back the changes that have happened.
It’s crazy to think it’s been years, but you’re dead on. In March of 2014, I walked into my dad’s office and told him, “I think I have a bigger vision for this organization than you do and I’d like you to let me be CEO.” It took a long weekend to think about it. He came back in and said, “You’re CEO. Don’t screw it up.” I quickly realized I’m going to need some help because you’re right, green is probably generous to give me at that stage of my career.
I think one of the keys to my success is being able to find smart people who understand what I’m trying to get done and can help guide me along that path. You’ve been a mentor to me, Brett, yourself, the Elite community has helped me. 2014 we started off and no looking back ever since, a better way of doing things.
One of the keys to success is finding smart people who understand what you're trying to get done and help guide you along that path. Share on XI certainly don’t expect you to divulge whatever you’re uncomfortable divulging, but could you at least give us sense for where your business was at in terms of revenue back then and some idea of growth?
I’m an open book, to the chagrin of some of my business partners. When we first started with Elite, it was probably about $1.5 million in revenue. I think we’d crossed over the million number. I hit that check box on the on the qualification list. We’re over $1 million, probably close to $1.5 million. We are north of ten times that now. On that journey, we probably had, I’ll guess, 8 or 9 people then. We keep bumping up and down on that 50 number in 2024. It’s been a wild year in the real estate market so it’s been an interesting year for us.
It’s been a wild journey. I’ll talk about two things in my life, especially when I’m talking about here at KCM. There’s business and there’s company. Those are two different things that most people in the business world will use interchangeably. At KCM, they mean two different things. First, the business is all the stuff we know, this is kpis, metrics, revenue, profitability and subscription revenue, CSAT and all the jargony business stuff that we all know and love and are critical to running a good business that you can scale.
The company side of things is these are the human beings coming into the office every single day with their amazingness, their weirdness. I’m lucky that I get a lot of weird ones. The weirdness that makes them people and figuring out how to put those people together to be able to create a greater thing. That’s the one of the funnest. That is one of the most fun things that we’ve got to do these years, is focus in that area and allow that to translate into business success on this side of things.
Before we get back into company building and I love that distinction that we make, before we get into those conversations, let’s keep our business minds on for a second, because I’m sure that people reading caught you saying 10X growth in revenue in those 10 years and 5X, maybe 6X growth on the headcount side. That’s a nice profitable thing that has been created there, which is amazing. I want to tip my hat at least to what you’ve accomplished, you and the team. I know you have not done that alone. You would be the first to say, “I built a company with amazing people.” You’ve done that, but it’s a great accomplishment.
The first time we had you on, I know we talked quite a bit about company building. We talked about some of the keys to you growing. I’m not going to test you. You don’t have to remember what we talked about back then. What I’d like to focus on a little bit more has to do with this company building that you mentioned. That distinction’s important. I don’t use that same thing, business versus company, but I love the way you think about it. I love the way you talk about it.
I know that KCM has, in the past, received some best small workplace awards in the United States. Best Small Workplaces in America. I’d love for you to talk about that a little bit to wow people because I like to impress people with what you’ve done. How high up did you get on those top 25 lists? That was pretty cool.
Great Places to Work is one of the best organizations in the world when it comes to understanding what it takes to be a great place to work. Where trust comes in, when innovation comes in, where belonging comes in, they’re one of the best. They run a certification every year. Since we’ve been doing this, we’ve been certified as a great place to work. Quickly, what goes into that, that is not you pay to get on the list. That is not revenue numbers. They’ll ask all those questions to understand where you go in which groups. That is purely based on a survey of when you’re smaller, it’s literally every single person in your organization. I think we’re allowed to get away with that 50. We can get 47. It’s the overwhelming majority.
At least 90%, right?
Yeah, North of 90%. It’s an anonymous survey that we encourage all of our folks to answer completely, honestly, because we get great information on the back end of that to understand where are we right now? What are the things we need to be working on? Where are we crushing it? Where are we falling down? We can make the changes that we need to make mostly company-wise, culturally or benefit-wis, empowerment-wise or leadership-wise. We have a lot of other metrics that’ll measure and give us indications early indicators around where’s the business going?
This gives us a good shot at where the company sits in that lexicon. Yes, we’ve been certified for years. I think we’re in the middle of that survey right now. We’ve made the top 50 lists for small businesses in the us, which I think is 200 or less employees, I think, is the group. We’ve made the top 50 4 or 5 times in those years. We’ve been as high as number four in the US, which was our high watermark that we’re always trying to figure out, “One, two or three or nothing right now.”
I thought I remembered number four, so thank you for validating my memory there. Anyway, Top Best Small Workplaces in America, number four. That’s pretty impressive. That’s what we want to spend our time on. I want to talk about what are some of the intentional things you’ve done to create that workplace? You got done saying that asking your people is the starting point. “People, what do you think? What’s going on? Where could we improve?” You’re doing that.
You’re checking in with your people and you’re asking them questions about how they experience your workplace. Let’s get beyond that even. Let’s talk about some of the things that you intentionally did to build such a company, such a workplace, such a culture because it’s impressive what you’ve built. I think you have a lot to share in that regard.
This is to anybody that reads the show, anybody who’s been in this community for any length of time. I’m going to repeat what they’ve already heard. It starts with purpose, values, mission. That is the bedrock, that is the foundation from which everything builds from. If you don’t have clarity in those three arenas, if you don’t understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, that’s your purpose. Some folks call it your why. If you’re a Simon Sinek fan, that’s going to resonate. Why do you do things? How does your organization operate? That is your core values. That’s an internal look. That does not ever need to be public. I will tell you, it’s great when they are, but it does not need to be that.
A Strong Company Culture: Purpose, values, and mission are the bedrock from which everything builds.
It’s internally, how do you operate and how do you align as a group? Your mission is what are you trying to accomplish? If you can get clear on why do we exist, how do we work together as a team, what are we trying to accomplish, you can build a lot, but you have to get those things. It starts there. Brett, I want to say we took almost a full year to get that right. We had drafts much earlier than that. Fine tuning based on conversations and what felt sticky, what elicited the right reaction. We were constantly iterating on that. We felt like we have it. It’s changed a smidge in the last few years. The good news is when you nail it and you build everything towards that, you don’t have to revisit it constantly. It becomes the bedrock and then you layer operations on top of that but it has to start there.
At the core of your company, the culture side of your business, the people side, the core of it is this purpose and values and then you have this mission that provides the clarity on where we’re going. I know this is going to be extremely difficult to quantify, in fact, it’s impossible. I’ve seen lots of great people try to do it, but is there any way that you could try to attribute some percentage, some impact to the 10X growth you’ve had to you doing this foundational work? Another way to talk about it would be how likely are you to have achieved the growth that you’ve achieved in the way that you’ve done it? I don’t know.
For chances to go from where we were, $1.5 million to call it $15 million, for our number’s sake, that 10X type of growth, what were the odds if we didn’t have this in place? Dismally small. We have a great product offering that fits the market and it and is a great offering. We’re probably underpriced, that probably helps too. Being able to scale that product, that would’ve attributed to some of the success. I think one of the biggest things that comes into this is we’ve benefited from being able to not only attract good talent to the team, but more importantly, retain that talent. This is easier when you’re smaller, it’s harder when you’re larger. There’s no doubt about that.
One of the biggest pain points that, as we’ve gotten bigger, we felt a little bit more than we did when we were smaller. I’ve definitely seen in some clients that I’ve worked with and consulted with is when you have turnover, not only is it expensive from having to rehire that person, the downtime that you’re going to have, the institutional knowledge of what that person knows and understands and can bring others, shepherd others along with them goes out the door. When you have incredibly low turnover, you don’t pay any of those costs, which allows momentum to continue to stack. You don’t take those steps back in your growth. Could we have gone 10X a lot slower with a lot more road bumps and a lot more hiccups? If the product’s pretty good, maybe. I’ll give us a good strong maybe.
Would we have been able to do it anywhere near as fast? Heck, no. I’m a New Yorker, so I want to use a different word there, but heck, no. There’s no doubt we would’ve been able to. There’s no doubt we would’ve been much slower if possibly been able to reach the same level of success. That comes from alignment of a team. I can talk more about that.
I know you could. Give us a sense. You alluded to the fact that as you’ve gotten bigger, maybe retention’s become a little bit more of a challenge, but for the first part of that journey, from 8 or 9 people to 20 or 30, let’s say, how often did you experience turnover or lose people, attrition?
Attrition is a tricky thing. You never want to lose anybody, whether it’s your decision or their decision. That’s never the goal. Everybody enters into a work relationship assuming everything is going to go exactly the way you want it to go. That happens sometimes. It doesn’t happen all the time. All challenges or leadership challenges, I’ll take the ownership of all the ones that we missed on.
Let me modify the question. Let’s talk about regrettable turnover, then.
That’s where I was going to go. I can think of 2 in our 10 years that I was like, “That stinks,” because I had high hopes they were doing well. For both, it was an opportunity that they had to take. I get it, but it hurt. There were others, it’s like we didn’t do the best by them. They weren’t living into the values on our side of things and some hybrid of those too across the board. I’m not saying it was zero beyond those two. It wasn’t that. From a regrettable one where I’ll take them back right now in a heartbeat, 2 in 10 years. I’d say that’s pretty darn good. For seven years, it was zero.
That’s a huge difference. It’s hard to put the number to it, but when you’re trying to grow all the things you described, scale the product, make all those changes, to have a core team that stays together, that works well together, that gets along that likes each other, that speed of trust thing that Covey talked about is super real. Not to mention the crazy expensive cost of turnover and you already alluded to that.
I’m a big baseball fan. Prior to KCM, I grew up in minor league baseball, so I watched a lot of teams win at the minor league level that then graduated to the major league level and they win. The Atlanta Braves is a great example of that. Now, that team, the core 4 or 5 of them, I was a Yankees fan growing up. That core four won together as minor leaguers. They grew up and they knew how to win together. When you have this consistency of these groups, they’re classes that come through and I can think of there’s 4 or 5 special people that have been here for years. They lead a lot of the organization right now and they’ve continued to grow.
They all started as virtual as a very junior employees in year one at KCM. Now they lead large areas of the organization for us. That doesn’t happen with that cohesion in their connection. They meet once a week, maybe every other week right now, on their own of their own desire and their own impetus to figure out, “What are we doing well? Where can we be better leaders? How can we show up for our team? What challenges are you going through and how can we help solve them?” That wasn’t something dictated. They got together saying like, “We can benefit from each other. We’ve all been here for a while. We know what good looks. How do we help each other?” You don’t get that if you don’t have that time, that speed of trust, as you so well said.
We talk about the ones and threes of revenue a lot in our Elite community. When you went from $1 million to $3 million and $3 million to $10 million, those stage changes often require us to change out some of the people. The people that helped us get to $1 million, they may be okay to help us get to $3 million. What you described said, “No, they not only helped us get from $1 million to $3 million, but they helped us get from $3 million to $10 million and they’re still involved.” What are some of the things you’ve done to enable their growth? They’re continuing to g grow with the company so that they can stick around and contribute in meaningful ways.
I’ll say I have three things that come to mind on that. I reserve the right to, maybe there’s a fourth that I haven’t figured out yet. I think three things. I think one, intentional investment in people development from an early stage. It does not need to be expensive, especially in the current world, it is a lot more expensive ten years ago than it is now. Intentional investment in people development has paid huge dividends for us to be able to have this class that I was referencing. I go through from junior employees when they first started off to senior leaders in the organization, trusted. None of that group I’m talking about is on the official leadership team, but is absolutely the trusted group that when we have questions, I go to them before I go to my leadership team on certain issues.
They’ve seen more. They know more about what I’m thinking. Intentional people development, I’m a believer in people. At my core, I believe in people and their greatness. It’s my job to unlock it at every level of what that needs to be. I’m also very aware that sometimes, a person’s greatness is not climbing the corporate ladder. Somebody who was leading part of our organization might not be leading that part of our organization now and they’re still here. That is a difficult dance to nail.
However, when you have a culture that is based on believing in people and wanting the best for them and that shines through in a lot of different ways, I think you have a chance. I think that’s been one of our great advantages. We’ve been able to hire executives above people who were leading an organization and having the strong conversation with them to help them understand, “I think this is the best thing for the organization. I think it’s the best thing for you,” and we’re going to go prove that out.
I want to say I don’t think we’ve been perfect in that, but I also can’t think of anything where we’ve taken a back step on that either. I don’t want to claim perfection because I’m sure I’m missing one. We’ve had numerous examples of being able to do that well. I think = that always goes back to what I’ll call culture as a big catchall of how you lead people, how you make people feel the environment. I think you said earlier, “You built a business,” and then you very quickly modified, “Your team built the business. You built the team.”
I think the biggest thing that I did is I built an environment, a space and a set of operating rules for how we’re going to operate. Let the team go work within that space to achieve greatness. That’s physical space and that’s metaphysical space. Physical space is a big thing for us. We’re all in office in hybrid, you have to do things differently.
That’s not my bag. I know a lot of companies that do that great. It’s creating the physical and metaphysical space of safety and of trust and of how we’re going to do things and then let great people go do their thing. It’s a huge piece. You do that, you can see people continue to grow, but also recognize like, “My growth might not look like what it looks like in so many other organizations. I’m either up or out.”
I talked to a lot of business owners, Bill, who all know the saying, “We need to spend more time working on the business, not just in it.” I want to take the opportunity right now while people are reading what you said and have them connect the dots between developing people, creating this space, in your case, the KCM way, can be developed and people can live in accordance with that way. They can live that way and go achieve goals together. That work that you did to create the space to develop people, that is what working on the business looks like.
You would say working on the company, but you know what I’m getting at. We all get stuck in the business. For the relatively few who do break out of that and say, “I’m going to work on my business now,” sometimes you don’t know where to start. You lay that out very well. You started with purpose, values and mission and then you created a space where the KCM way could develop and you hired people into that space to go do great things. All of that work is what it looks like to work on the business. I wanted to call that out because I think you’ve done that extraordinarily well.
Thank you.
Where else should we go with this? Culture. People talk about that. They think about break rooms and ping pong tables and smoothies and whatever else. All those things are so fun. Of course we want all those things in our workplace, but I know you don’t believe that’s at the core of culture. You’ve already talked about purpose, values, mission at the core of culture. Talk about some practical ways that you brought this KCM way to life? You talked about creating a space. There’s a physical and a meta metaphysical. Maybe you want to comment on both, but how did you create this environment where people can come together in a special way and create great results?
There’s so much here. Culture, as I would define it, if somebody asked me, “Bill, what do you think of is culture?” it’s not going to be found in any textbook. It’s the energy or lack thereof from a group of people towards common goals, practices, beliefs and achievements. It’s the energy or lack thereof. Every organization has a culture. Some of them are intentional. In my experience in talking to friends who were workplaces, many of them are unintentional. I think that one of the differences that we’ve done and to people that I talk to, if I could give a piece of advice to anybody, it would be like be intentional about your culture. Figure out what you want it to be and then act that way.
Company culture is the energy or lack thereof from a group of people towards common goals, practices, beliefs, and achievements. Share on XDo things that manifest that belief that you have in whatever that looks like. We are an in-person culture. We believe that when people get together, that has been part of the code of how humans have grown for eons. If we are together, we are better. We can talk. Water cooler talk is a real thing. It’s not a nice to have those are where bonds and trust and connections get formed and where great ideas come from. Cool. That’s my belief. That may not be true for everybody but I want to recruit and I want to develop towards that belief structure. How do my actions follow that belief? If I have that belief and my office looks like I’ll take a shot, I’ve never been to the IRS. I can’t imagine it looks fun.
If I have this belief and if I’m saying these words and my office does not reflect that, there’s a disconnect where you’re not getting the results that you’re looking for. We invest in a beautiful office. We don’t have ping pong tables. We do have a chess board because that’s one of our core values that play chess, not checkers. We do have a big life-sized chess board with life-sized chess pieces we’ve all seen on vacation destinations. That’s our boardroom.
We do follow that up. There are little games and that stuff, because we like to have fun. We don’t take ourselves seriously. We take what we do very seriously. We like to have fun. That is a part of our culture, but that’s the manifestation of our beliefs, of our values. We have bright colors. We want people to have a lot of energy. We have a lot of light coming into the office. We want to create a space that folks feel real comfortable and energetic about coming to, knowing that, especially in this world, they have options. We want to back up what our belief structure is and then show people what that space is. For us, physical space is critically important.
You glossed over this because of your belief system and your culture, but there’s a lot of people who are fighting this pull towards more hybrid, more remote, more virtual work from home situations. How are you competing for talent in a world where those are more and more the desires, the norms? You’re asking people to come work at an office still. Did I hear that right?
A hundred percent. Yes, we have whatever it is, 50 people, and every single one of them works from the office.
I know that, but I want you to talk about that because people are scratching their head right now. “How is he doing that?”
I think two things are true. I think one, if we let ourselves believe that every human being is the same and nobody wants to come to an office and everybody wants to be hybrid, we’re kidding ourselves. There’s more than 8 billion people on this planet. We’re all different. Not one of us is a carbon copy identical. Even the most identical twins are not actually identical. They’re still their own human being. We have to recognize that we’re all different. If somebody wants to work hybrid or wants to work fully remote, that’s one of our prescreen questions for job applicants. If that’s what you want, you’re going to hate it here. Why would I make you go through this process? What we’ve found, there’s some people who enjoy getting out of the house.
A Strong Company Culture: Even the most identical twins are not identical. They’re still their own human being. We have to recognize that we’re all different.
I didn’t even know if we skew towards extroverts. I actually think we skew introvert on the Myers-Briggs scale. We have people who enjoy being around other people. KCM provides an opportunity for that. For those people that, that is an important aspect of their life, right now, we’re a phenomenal destination. We couldn’t ever look better because so many companies are going, “Reduce footprint, reduce cost. Let’s go hybrid. Hybrid is the future.”
I was having a conversation with one of my key people on my team. There is an argument to be made that in the remote world. They care about their people more because they’re giving them autonomy and how they want to go do that. I can’t fight that. I think that’s true. There is a segment of people who want to be around other people.
I’m one of them. I would lose myself. I would go crazy in a fully remote environment. The pandemic was not fun for me. I’m very happy to be back on that side of things, but there’s a group out there that’s important. Whatever you believe. I’m in-office. I have friends that run amazing companies. It’s how you manifest and how you live into that that becomes important of do you believe that? If you’re going to say, “Remote’s important to me. Hybrid’s important to me and that’s the direction that we want to go,” you better have great connectivity tools.
If you’re still using some basic instant messenger, you’re not on Zoom, in the world right now, I think most companies are starting to recognize periodically, we have to get our team together. You and your team do a great job of this. It’s like, not every day, but at KCM, that makes sense for us. We have to get our team together because you do need to build those relationships. I think companies that invest in there, it’s a lot cheaper than rent. My rent’s way too expensive. These are all trade-offs and it comes from what are your beliefs and what do you value and where do you want to get your gains from? For me, collaboration, creativity and having teams that work together is more important than anything else so I invest in that area.
Collaboration, creativity, and having teams that work together is more important than anything else. So, invest in that area. Share on XThank you for going down that little side trip. I knew that there’d be some people who would be thinking to themselves, “Somebody’s making a stand for in-office work.” It’s not like you have a retail location. It’s not like that. You have a product that could be distributed. It is distributed electronically over the web. You could do it in any number of ways. You could do it offshore, you could do it all contractors, but you choose to build an expensive team and pay expensive rent and have them all be in the office because that is the KCM way.
We can feel the strategic advantage that we get from that and we back that up. The other argument that I hear a lot from folks is like, “You’re not getting the best talent to the organization.” I’m like, “Who’s governing what’s the best talent?” I’m sitting here, it’s like, “I got a great team. I’ll take my team against pretty much any other team on the planet right now and I’ll take my team 10 out of 10.” That’s the case. We’ve been able to recruit. Richmond, Virginia is a great city. It’s not in the top 10 of the most desirable cities to go to. I know we’re not there. It’s a great city, but it’s not one of those. It’s not Austin or any of these crazy spots. We get people all the time that move to Richmond to work at KCM.
I think that’s a testament to what they see when they talk to our folks when they do the interview. They believe in what we believe in, both from a business standpoint of who we’re for in the real estate professional and the families that they serve, as well as who we are and what we believe about how work should be done.
I knew this was going to happen. The time has evaporated and we could talk forever and ever, but I think that what you described is so critical. Best team, A players stuff. How do you compare with others? Maybe you can’t on performance very well, but you’re not doing too shabby from a performance standpoint and you’re getting these Great Place to Work certifications that are an indication that the best teams wouldn’t put up with not being in a great place. The best teams flee bad workplaces. The fact that you’ve maintained that says you built a home for great teams, great people and you’re investing in their development and it pays off for them and it pays off for you.
This was so much fun. Bill, let’s bring it back to some summary level here. As you think back on your company building time at KCM and the role that culture has played and the role that believing in your people and developing them has played in the success of your business, any parting thoughts for our readers?
I think parting thoughts-wise, I’ll come back to something I said earlier and this is not advice that I generally give, but I think it came up in this conversation. I think what’s important is recognize that wherever you are in your company’s journey, you have a culture. If you turn around and you close your eyes and if it’s what you imagine, you’re doing a great job. If it’s not cool, you know where to go. There’s work to be done. Be intentional about how you are operating. Be intentional with language, be intentional with space, physically or virtually.
Here’s what I’ll say, Brett. I’ll sum this up this way. A friend of you and I, Tyler Norton, shared with me at one point. He said, “Show me your P&L and I will show you your strategy.” What he is communicating there is that, “Show me where your resources are going and I’ll show you what’s important to you.” If you’re getting the results that you want and you look at your P&L, that makes sense. If you’re not investing in areas and you’re unhappy with where you’re getting the results there, make a change. This is the age-old quote, “Put your money where your mouth is.” When you live that way, people respect authenticity.
A Strong Company Culture: Put your money where your mouth is. When you live that way, people respect authenticity.
Bill, this has been an absolute pleasure. I want to add to put your money where your mouth is. Put your money, put your time, put your energy, put your focus where your mouth is. It’s so hypocritical of us as business owners, as company builders, as leaders, when we say one thing, but all the other things go elsewhere. That’s a recipe for people who become disengaged, unplugged, and unhappy. “We’re saying this and we’re doing this,” and they got excited, they signed up for this, but then all your actions, all your money, all your time go towards other things. They feel that disconnect and they go, “I can’t live this way. I signed up for this, not that.” Anyway, it’s been so much fun. Thank you for coming back, my friend.
Always, my friend. Thank you so much for having me. I look forward to seeing you soon.
Bill, if people want to connect with you on social or learn more about KCM, how would they do that?
KCM is KeepingCurrentMatters.com. If you’re in the residential real estate business, you’d love to hang out. If you’re not, then that’s probably not going to be a site that is going to mean anything to you. LinkedIn and Instagram. Search for Bill Harney. I’m sure you’re going to find me. I’m happy to chat. Anything culture, company building or have a debate on in person versus remote, I’ll play either side you want me to on that one. These conversations give me a lot of energy and I’m happy to connect with people that think it’s important.
For all of you out there reading, please share, like, review, do all those things to help as many seven-figure business owners as possible read this amazing episode with Bill and keep reading. We love having you here and we’ll see you next time.
Important Links
- Bill Harney – Past Episode
- Keeping Current Matters
- LinkedIn – Bill Harney
- Instagram – Bill Harney
About Bill Harney
Bill Harney challenges what is possible in the workplace. He is a visionary entrepreneur and the esteemed Owner & Executive Advisor of Keeping Current Matters, the leading educational content provider for the housing industry.
After years leading sales and marketing teams in professional sports, Bill joined his father to grow KCM from a founder-focused small business to an industry powerhouse. After taking over as CEO in 2014, Bill built KCM with a unique mix of business savvy, cultural investments, and an unwavering commitment to employee empowerment.
His proudest professional achievement is the strength & consistency of KCM’s culture as the team has grown from six people in a garage to 50+ employees working together in Richmond, VA. Doing things others believed impossible through rapid growth, KCM’s for-people culture has been the secret sauce powering their business success.
It is this commitment to culture that has allowed KCM to be recognized as one of Fortune Magazine’s “Best Workplaces in Real Estate” and certified by Great Places to Work as a Top 100 small workplace in America a whopping seven times since 2016.
Bill is an expert in team leadership, strategic planning, and scaling powerful cultures. He is a frequent podcast guest and highly sought-after speaker, sharing the secrets of KCM’s success so others can build game-changing cultures too.
