How to Double EBITDA in 3 Years The Multi-Unit Retail Playbook

Alex Rawlings speaks with Jeff Helfgott, CEO of Boardroom Salon, about scaling PE-backed multi-unit businesses. They discuss talent strategy, retention, resilience, and how to turn operational fixes into sustainable growth.

⏱️ Key Timestamps

00:00 – Introduction & Jeff’s Background
From barbershop beginnings to PE-backed CEO.

01:04 – Common PE Mistakes
Overlooking talent strategy during diligence.

02:11 – Talent Assessment
Evaluating teams based on current business needs.

05:58 – Hiring Non-Negotiables
Integrity and focus on top 3 priorities.

08:18 – Resilience in Leadership
Navigating crises like COVID.

10:10 – Managing Growth & Change
Using EOS and quarterly planning.

14:11 – Driving EBITDA Growth
Fix retention before scaling revenue.

16:01 – Retention Flywheel
Employee retention → customer retention → growth.

18:24 – Membership Strategy
Aligning offerings with real customer behavior.

21:18 – Finding the Real Constraint
Using data segmentation to identify core issues.

24:31 – Data vs Insight
Combining analytics with customer feedback.

27:33 – KPI Pitfalls
Avoid over-optimising a single metric.

28:02 – PE Thesis vs Reality
Treat strategy as a hypothesis, not fact.

29:12 – Underrated Growth Lever
Talent retention and adaptability.

32:08 – Building Resilient Teams
Supporting middle management and preventing burnout.

35:25 – Resources & Closing

🚀 Key Takeaways

• Assess talent early in diligence
• Integrity and resilience are critical traits
• Retention is a primary driver of growth
• Data must be paired with real customer insight
• Pressure-test your investment thesis
• Middle management drives execution

Raw Selection partners with Private Equity firms and their portfolio companies to secure exceptional executive talent. We focus on de-risking executive recruitment through meticulous search and selection processes, ensuring top-tier performance and long-term success.

🔗 Connect with Alex Rawlings on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexrawlings/

🌐 Visit Raw Selection www.raw-selection.com

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Transcript

00:00
Welcome back to the Royal Selection Private Equity Podcast. Joining us today  is Jeff Helfgott,  CEO of the Bordroom Salon, a private equity backed  multi-unit  retail business. And Jeff is going to go into detail of his experiences  on scaling this business and private equity backed businesses.  Let's dive in.  Jeff, if you can share with us a brief insight into you, please.

00:30
Absolutely.  I've been running private equity backed multi-unit retail businesses for over 10 years where the experience drives the outcome.  Largely people driven businesses. actually got my career start sweeping hair in a barber shop. So my career role running boardroom salon for men feels like a full circle moment.  And  in the middle there, I was actually running teams with the UF military.

00:55
and frontline combat roles. And despite all that wonderful experience, I am definitely afraid of rollercoasters.

01:04
What is um one mistake that you see private equity or portfolio companies making and what would you suggest to correct them?

01:14
I see a lot of the, the focus in the initial underwriting on the value creation plan, makes a ton of sense, but there's not as much focus on the talent development plan. And you had a couple of guests recently that had a great segment on nine block exercises and evaluating talent.  And I would really urge private equity groups to look at that a little earlier in the thesis before you actually signed the dotted line. Because it can lead to great conversations with the founders about.

01:43
Here's where we assess the team and here's where we think we're going to have to work on some training and find some mentors and other places where if it doesn't work out, we might have to make some investments. But I find getting that out in the open early and not only coalescing the founder around what needs to be done, but the rest of the deal team so they can supplement where necessary leads to the best possible outcomes. I mean, obviously talent's one of my favorite subjects given the

02:11
running an executive search firm, with  different business, you're dipping your toe back into or diving back into  franchising  again and looking at that for the boardroom business.  What are you doing around the kind of assessment of talent? Because yours is slightly different. You're getting into bed with people. You're not going, hey, off your trot type scenario becomes a little bit more complexity. So how are you building that into your playbook to

02:40
Obviously avoid yourself making the mistake you're sharing.

02:46
One of the models that I built with a partner, one of the private equity groups I started my career with, Altamont Capital, because we could get our knees on this with a couple of different portfolio companies that I had worked with them on. So one the things that I iterated with them on was a column assessment evaluation matrix that we would use during the underwriting process. And what we aligned on is...

03:12
Um, you know, what are the criteria that are most important for that role and how would we assess that executive based off the needs of the organization today, not where we aspired it to be in the future. Um, because a lot of times you get so focused on building the team that you end up neglecting some of the base capabilities that you need to invest in order to get to that blow. And as a really specific example, we had a head of talent that was

03:40
Uh, running one of these portfolio companies and being pathic operator, if you have top of Nazla's hierarchy of needs, uh, well, we really dug down into the nitty gritty of that business. found out that they're paying healthcare premiums for employees who had left 18 months before because they didn't have a strong employee census. You don't want to make that kind of mistake  and you don't want to be in year three realizing this. So.

04:07
Uh, making sure that we had a leader in that chair who was focused on the compliance work,  um, kind of building the foundational elements of HR so we could get to that really a higher aspirational level. How are we building an employer brand that stands out in this competitive environment? That's a great place to be once you have fixed those other things. And having that conversation early allowed us to have,  um, a more thoughtful preliminary discussion about.

04:35
Is this a need to replace that head of people or can we compliment them with someone that's more focused on the run the business tasks? But they can kind of operate in parallel.  I think there's  a number of different ways that you can approach this. My advice is the earlier, the better.  And in my experience, many private equity groups, especially in the beginning, kind of tip toe around it for fear of not coming across as founder friendly. every group.

05:03
loans being able to say they're on  most founder friendly list for private equity firms. And you know, that can come at a cost of ignoring problems that are  really threatening your value creation plan. It's just like every private equity firm that I've ever worked with, ever spoken with are all top decile performance results. And I'm like, well, if you guys are all hitting top decile performance results, who is it that's doing the poor performance  work?

05:30
that's, that's driving everyone else. that's, um, I'd say that's a joke, but genuinely pretty much every P firms top decile. The, um,  uh, you just hang out with a great crowd. Maybe that's the case. Average of the five people and all the people that hang around with me get top decile performance results.  Um, the, uh, so you mentioned the matrix they use. Um, what I've found with matrix and these kinds of key elements is that usually we have,  um,  like a preferred element that we look at.

05:58
That's like the, hey, if they don't have this, we take it out. So rather than breaking down the whole matrix at this point,  what are the one or two things that you were like, hey, if they scored low on this, it didn't matter what it was, we moved on.  That business wasn't right for acquisition or we needed to create a contingency plan  with regards to the executive team or that executive leader. What was one of those two things?

06:21
I love that you distill it down. And that's actually one thing I've done with our current company of boardroom is  I don't have job descriptions or job postings that have every single responsibility. I distill it down to the top three things you have to do, or you will be fired. Cause I've run into scenarios in the past where someone would say, well, I'm doing nine out these 10 things great in my academic years. That's the 90%. That's an A. And in reality, that one thing they weren't doing was the most critical part of the job. So there is a.

06:50
disparity of perception for how their performance actually was. So I found filling it down to the top three is really critical. You know, when I look at what the deal breaker, integrity is clearly number one. And I had a, a past role where I was evaluating an M and A opportunity and we're really excited about the business. was a broker driven process. And as we start to get into the deeper levels of the diligence, we saw that there was, um,

07:21
A difference between the revenue numbers that were in their accounting books and then their taxes versus what was coming through the point of sale.  And when we asked the feller why the reason that they gave was, well, we take some cash transactions and don't report it to the IRS to lower our tax burden. And from my perspective, you know, like I was trying to get the platform going at that point, we were relatively unknown. So it's kind of like take any deal that.

07:49
Uh, is willing to come to you, but I looked at that as an integrity. Big goal that was reflecting how that partner might be choosing to work to me. Uh, because if you're willing to lie to the government, I'm sure you're probably willing to lie to you as well. So I walked away from that deal after a considerable investment in accounting and legal diligence, but it was the right thing to do. And you know, what, one of the early lessons that I've learned and I tried to remind myself, I actually have. Brained letterhead from Enron, uh,

08:18
business that uh defaulted in the early 2000s is at the bottom of their letterhead. They have their core values. The second one on there is integrity. So I framed it by my door. So I walk in and out of my office every day.  It's a reminder that values are just words on a page unless you live them every single day. So integrity for me was absolutely critical for all the executives.  I operate using the EOS framework. I've heard some of the other guests mentioned that they love traction.

08:48
Um, so a big part of that is accountability. You don't have accountability if you don't have trust in the executive. So that to me is paramount. The other thing that I found, especially at lower mid market private equity backed businesses is you need a great deal of resilience. You need someone that can take a couple hits and find a way to just keep on driving because some of these investments are a grant. have COVID. uh

09:14
And when COVID hit, we were six days away from selling the business that I was running at the time. So we went from selling it to saving it. And that was tough because I bought a giant house thinking I was going to have a nice payday. So moral of the story is don't do that until the money's in the bank.  Lesson learned. But it was a grind leading, especially in a multi-unit retail environment where the regulatory environment was changing every single day. So finding a team that had the resilience to...

09:41
lead with a positive attitude, especially through that time, I think was a big difference maker and why we were so successful. You mentioned earlier about kind of getting down to those three main KPIs for each role.  We could, I'd love to go through each job, but we're not going to have hours to go through it.  one thing that, a  bit of a steal for me personally here, but how do you manage the change? Cause as a business grows, focus grows.

10:10
focus changes, sorry. And those top three things  may not now be the top three things. So what's your process with regards to manage the expectations of the individual which you were gonna, hey Jeff, thanks a lot. You're changing the milestone, you're changing the metrics, changing the focus because the business is now  2X, 3X, EBITDA is now the focus, revenue was the focus last year. How do you review that as a cadence  and how do you...

10:39
manage that with the individual as the business grows.

10:46
I have found that a uh cadence of establishing those annual goals, but then bring the team together for a full one to two day planning session every quarter where we talk through  what are the new goals needed to support um the annual goals that we've established. So again, using the EOS framework, we talk about a one year goal, but then we talk about quarterly rocks. And I generally find that the goals rarely change over that year.

11:16
timeframe because they are more focused on the output that we're trying to achieve and as opposed to the means in which to achieve them. uh So one of the goals that we had in the past was we wanted to grow our same store sales revenue by double digits. And we had a couple of hypotheses on how to approach that. uh So our quarterly rocks became testing those hypotheses  and

11:42
Every quarter when we were tackling it became a conversation of do we have the right team and talent organically to tackle this? And if we don't, until we know that this is a long-term need, can we go find some of the talent and fractional capability  so we can rent it before we decide if we have to buy it or not? As we vetted those hypotheses and then became part of our more long-term value creation, then the conversation evolved to do we have that team organically?

12:11
Or do we need to make a change? And in some cases we've had the ability to get in front of that. And we were able to get mentors and training in place. Other times, because we were painting that picture and the team was brought along on a regular cadence, they saw the needs of the business were evolving beyond a skill or a desire that they had. And they're almost every single case over my entire career.

12:36
When you bring someone on the journey and say, is what the organization needs. This is what you're doing today. Are you interested in learning this? The facility to train you, let's get you there. And then it just becomes a question of can you do it or not? A lot of times the executive says, Hey, that's not my sweep spot. That's not who I want to be. I've tried that before. I didn't enjoy it, but then it becomes a really thoughtful transition rather than a disastrous breakup. So I found it absolutely critical to.

13:05
have your entire leadership team in the planning sessions in the room.  Um, so that they understand the why behind it  and understand the direction the business is going so that they could feel comfortable. They will have, they'll have a seat on the bus  or that will be treated well if the time comes that they're not the right fit. And that's actually been tremendous for the culture and seeing that when people decide it's not the right fit for them, that they're treated with respect and allowed to transition away that respect.

13:35
both them and the needs of the business. Part of what you've shared is going to be covered in this question,  if you,  you know, every private ex-EBAT Chief Exec as you are at the moment with  a growth on mind,  usually focused with regards to EBITDA, because that's the,  obviously the multiple generator. If you're shared with you guys, your playbook, Jeff, and go out there, double EBITDA in three years, what aside from what you've already shared  is in your plan in order to accomplish that?

14:05
and keep your private equity firm happy.

14:11
Yeah, think, um,  it obviously depends on the needs of the business.  My perspective when I joined boardroom changed after my first three months here, I thought my way to double revenue was, uh, launching some modifications to the membership model and then to our marketing plan. When I got here, I realized we had a leaky bucket  of clients that were churning faster than.

14:36
What our level of service suggested they should be and we had a number of levers that we had to pull to get there. I'm fortunate that  the company well before I stepped into the chair made really substantial investments in data infrastructure.  And because of that investment, it's  candidly the best data infrastructure I've ever seen for a company of our size. So I'm very thankful  to the prior management teams, but also to our board for making that investment.  We thought that we were.

15:06
turning a lot of our high value clients when we were losing some of our most tenured styles and barbers.  And a lot of businesses are like this. You look at high end training businesses  or uh fitness or wellness businesses where the providers or professionals have a relationship  directly with the clients. You look at med aesthetics, which is another great example, uh where when a provider leaves, they often bring their book of business wisdom. uh

15:35
And a lot of private equity groups wrap themselves in the comfort blanket of a non-compete.  And I will tell you, you don't want to be in a courtroom, a wooden forever jury against a single mother who's trying to provide for her kids while you're the big bad, scary private equity group saying, well, she signed a paper. that, that doesn't work. You need to find a better way to manage that. So rather than  leaning on a non-compete  or,  um,

16:01
trying to be more aggressive in marketing, my first play was how can I build a employee environment that allows me to retain our talented stylists and barbers even longer.  And we made a tremendous improvement when I got here, our uh employee churn at that floor level was about 70 % annually.  And within about eight months, it had normalized to a run rate of about 34%.

16:29
tremendous, tremendous change in trajectory. And that led to really significant improvement in our existing client retention, which we track separately from new client retention, because existing clients, they have relationships inside those four walls and they expect uh some level of consistency. uh New client retention is a very different topic. So that's where I focused initially. And as I saw that I was able to retain more talented employees longer.

16:59
and make this a better work environment. They stayed longer, they were happier, and that had a substantial impact, not only on our uh existing guest retention, but also our NTS. So that kicks off the flywheel where now your clients are referring more friends to your business, which allowed you to bring more people in, which allowed your staff to make more money, which keeps them happier, and that self perpetuates over time. uh So that was the first major step. From there,

17:29
The fire was stopped and we could spend a little bit more time saying, how do we make this the business that we would want to be franchisees of? Um, and one of the things that was missing was a recurring revenue model. Private equity loved us. I don't need to tell your audience and in haircare, not as common as you would think. Uh, we had a membership program in the past that was focused on buying access for a period of time to unlimited services.

17:56
But back to that data question, we realized that most men, uh, only needed a haircut every four or five weeks. So when we are positioning an unlimited haircut opportunity or package over a finite period of time at a really high cost, that was appealing to about 15 % of the people who walked through the door, which means we had a membership program that was not attracted to, yeah, 80 % of the people that were walking in. we launched.

18:24
Something very different, um a revision to our membership internally, we called M2.0. And this was the capstone, my first year at boardroom, the year we coined the year of retention. One other way that we were driving that retention was by getting people into a membership that allowed us to build deeper relationships. So we evolved a membership through a one,  one haircut per month credit system.  And we made it exceptionally generous where you have one haircut per month.

18:53
If you can't use that month, cause you're traveling, uh, you have a wedding in Italy or you're going skiing in Tahoe, that credit just rolls over.  And even if you decide that you're going to end your membership with us, you're no longer paying customer.  allow you to use those outstanding credits for three months after you cancel. As a way of just saying thank you for being a member and hopefully rekindling the relationship with the new provider.  Um,

19:20
But that was tremendous for us. And over a very short amount of time,  we tripled the amount of member driven visits to the business. from a year of retention, from the first year, we stabilized our employee base that led to better client retention. And then by adding a membership program, that was a better reflection, the needs of our broader base in forms by our data stack.  had a tremendous first year.  And as I saw those steps leading to higher NPS and better guest retention.

19:50
That gave me the confidence to then really turn on the spigot for throwing more advertising dollars on because we had built the model that scaled. And this year it's been the year of growth. So we've been pouring more fuel on the fire. Our new client traffic last I looked this morning was up 49.6%. Um, and we have that many new people walking through the doors. It gives you the opportunity to again, extend that flywheel even more. So  doubling EBITDA everyone focuses on.

20:19
On the revenue marketing aspect, can tell you the number of times I've heard our  investment thesis is digital marketing, but being able to take a step back and say, what do we actually need in order to build a base where digital marketing would be cost effective, but stop that leaky bucket, that's been transformative for our value. Well, Percy, thank you very much for going into that level of detail and context. I've got a few questions on the back of that as you'd expect. Sorry to interrupt. Just a quick mention of a longstanding partnership with Grata.

20:48
As you all probably know, the private equity scene is constantly evolving and deal flow is moving now to proprietary and data-driven processes. Grata provides you with the data and information of over 7 million private companies. So if you're looking to improve your proprietary deal flow and improve the data access, then reach out to Grata today. Now back to the podcast. Let's start with the constraints. So what you identified as the main constraint being retention.

21:18
As executives, we spend a lot of time on trying to fix problems. Those problems sometimes give us return on investment. And if they don't, it's been a complete utter waste of time, although we'll tell ourselves that it was worthy.  How did you come to the conclusion that the main problem was customer retention? And what was the other constraints that you thought it could be this? If we tackle this, that might bring us the largest return on investment.

21:46
I think that we're diving down into that data was exceptionally helpful. And again, I was able to move as quickly as I did because the people before me made that investment, but separating out retention into segments that are logical allowed us to understand from a benchmarking perspective. You know, if you're existing client retention is here, how does that compare to what you would expect for the type of business that you're running?

22:11
If you're in line with fun, can focus on the next level of value creation. And I'll say, you know, the old McKinsey or top three consulting frameworks of breaking your revenue down into as many small buckets as possible in order to identify the real root cause has been extremely helpful. And it was a great skill to have learned. If I had blended that in with new client retention, it might've met the problem. uh

22:37
And then when we began breaking existing client retention down into members, long-term members,  people that came once or twice a year, people that came with frequency that was frequent, you  know, maybe four times a year, but made the decision not to become members and asking the why behind each of those segments allowed us to understand what we need to do in order to make a more attractive boardroom uh for that specific segment.

23:06
And there are some segments that we chose to break up with. if the  existing client retention was higher in some areas,  um, but lower in others, if we didn't  really focus on that segment, because that was our core client, we chose not to get distracted by that. So I think again, that's where he really thoughtful advanced segmentation exercise. Hold the mirror up to your business to say, are you really retaining the people that you aspire to retain?

23:36
And equally on the marketing side, think  marketing for new clients is very natural to people. don't always see as level or as deep a level of granularity on the existing client base. you mentioned that data was important and like everybody in private equity, I'm a big fan of data-driven decision-making. We're regularly trying to identify the constraint, the problem, the challenge, get into the minutiae over it. And then obviously...

24:02
take action, but before we do that, we check with the ratios and the metrics and everything else that we've got before we do anything, because  I've been  historically very good at fixing problems that don't move the needle,  but giving myself a pat on the back. What was it in the data? You've obviously mentioned client retention was clear there, but the data also gives us the indication of what we shouldn't do as well as what we should. So what was it that was in the data that you didn't expect to see in this kind of size of business that gave you the, oh

24:31
This is above and beyond. What were the bits that you said, ah, this is amazing that we have X, Y and Z. Usually we wouldn't have that.

24:41
Not only did we have a data infrastructure that allowed us to track behavior well beyond what most businesses have at this size, uh but our private equity sponsor was very supportive of investing money into customer research focus groups, other types of exercises that I normally see held for brands that are substantially larger.  And they look at this as despite, you know, our initial investment thesis kicked off in 2018.

25:11
Uh, you normally see those investments very early on, um, but they're willing to make that investment, you know, as late as 2023. which again, is typically when some firms are thinking about exiting the business, but they still saw so much potential. They're willing to stroke additional checks to help us realize our, our full, uh, potential of what boardroom could be. So getting down into not just the existing.

25:38
customer behavior that we can see from our data, but then asking those specific clients the why.  Um, because there's a big difference between truth and fact. was getting fat from our database. The truth only came from talking to those specific segments. So I could understand more of what was the decision making behind it. And one of the great insights that we got more recently, because we made a similar investment to understand why our member penetration, membership penetration is great, but it's not even better.

26:08
Is that a lot of guys are just have subscription fatigue or a fear of commitment. And look, I got married at 40. I'm not throwing down to people who have fear of commitment.  Um, but that was a major insight that helped us understand that maybe it wasn't worth trying to change the behavior for people that didn't see a path to clearly wanting to change their behavior. So at that point,  my takeaway was no amount of tweaking.

26:36
for things that are economically viable to us are going to change the mindset of that segment of people who are inverse to contractual commitments or other types of perceived ah stickiness. So we stopped chasing it. And instead we focused on how can we build a better boardroom ah in a better membership for the people that are willing to make that because we saw for those people that were not signing up for memberships, they were still coming with a lot of frequency. So our desire to turn them into members.

27:05
Was that necessarily driven from  a data driven urge too, but more of aspiring to move  the movement on a metric that might not necessarily be correlated with what's best for our long-term business. So we're in my experience, leadership teams that optimize for one specific metric at time do so at the risk of their core business. If I tried to shoe horn everyone into a membership out of the vanity.

27:33
they get that number to some aspirational metric, I might be disenfranchising a lot of really great customers. Yeah, makes sense. So what is the biggest misconception private equity investors make about running their portfolio companies? Oh, I love this question. I kind of alluded to it. Every single investment group has a thesis and what they should have is a high pop.

28:02
The number of times that I have seen a thesis  actually be executed in the value creation plan that realizes the value that we anticipated, I can count on zero hands. uh The number of times that I have seen a pressure test that hypothesis and then realize some elements of it are not uh true when tested in the actual market. uh

28:29
Has been every single time that I've been an operator or a board member. So  I think some people fall in love with the investment strategy and ignore the realities of the market and then get upset at management teams for not being able to execute a thesis that might not be a reflection in the reality of the business. So I very purposefully will correct in board meetings and in conversations with my management team, if someone says thesis, I interrupt and say, hi, Papa.

28:57
until I have conviction that that is the right thesis for us to be executing. I like that. Nice and simple. And which is the growth lever that most leaders underestimate?

29:12
UGH

29:16
Right now, I think...

29:20
And again, to give you a thoughtful nod here, uh the people retention recruiting plan, especially for talented executives.  is well-trod ground at this point that a lot of the investments that started, especially pre-COVID and then immediately post-COVID were anchored in valuations that will be hard to replicate in today's economic environment. em That's time for honest conversations about

29:49
How do we as a team want to be navigating this business environment understanding that some of the compensation that we were previously discussing and especially at the C-suite level, the largest part of your compensation is equity driven that might not be as clear of a roadmap as it was when we underwrote this. So I think.

30:13
Focusing on how can we get the right people for this stage of business, which might mean having tough conversations with the existing people. Some of those are our transition conversations because they don't have the right skill or the right hunger to be driving.  Um, in this environment, it's well  recognized at this point that the CBO turnover rates are substantially higher than they've ever been before. So that's burnout.

30:40
Uh, because the case of the business is moving exceptionally fast with AI changing, uh, by the minute it seems these days.  Um, but also the regulatory environment, the  macro economic environment, like it's exhausting to keep up on.  Um, and a lot of other executives are seeing that their skills are no longer as  unique and as defensible  in an age where.

31:07
AI is really leveling the playing field in terms of expertise. So it comes back down to what I spoke about before. The real differentiator at this point is resilience or people that will grind out the work  and finding executives and retaining those executives means getting a little creative with compensation now that equity might not be as meaningful at the way that we had underwritten it originally.  it comes to,  I find myself at a lot of times, especially, you when a

31:36
executive search to be a heavy based sales type environment where all companies isn't selling right. But that kind of resilience piece in building that in people and giving people's perspectives, how do you work on that with your team as you go through the good, the bad um and the ugly, just to coin an easy phrase. What do you do with your team to kind of have those resilience resets and when they're on the edge of uh stress, bring them back to  kind of mild  level to go again?

32:08
I find that  in, in my businesses, which is multi-unit retail, when you get to a scale, um, your business lives or dies by your middle management level. I can have the best roadmap, but I need experienced people who know the business from the ground up or normally area managers, regional managers, area directors, one of those titles. They are the backbone and every

32:33
Business that I've seen struggle unless there is major customer shift away from that segment.  Um, lot of the failure was driven from a middle management team that was not experienced enough,  um, to be running the business in the way that they needed to. So I really look at how do we build resilience there  and to fall back on a military analogy, they even rotated soldiers off the front line in world war two. Uh,  and right now retails the fight.

33:03
It's ugly  and trying to find labor that's going to work at the rate that are cost effective for the businesses and dealing with customers that have increasingly high expectations for service quality uh in times where we've had to tighten the belt, which means there are often fewer people and fewer resources at the frontline. I find it really helpful to  rotate some leaders off the front from time to time.

33:30
Give them an opportunity to work on the back office initiative, still protect the role so they can go back. Give them extra vacation days. celebrate their successes with ways that get them out of the four walls and unplug them from the phone. Uh, we had a contest where we sent one of our  frontline employees. He was a great producer and not only do we want to reward her, but we want to protect her from burnout. So we sent her to Hawaii  and sent back.

33:58
great pictures of the time that she and her family had there. Yeah. think the, the,  uh, the frontline regional leadership is a position where you cannot do that remotely. That's an apprenticeship model that is  only done face to face. We have to be living in the field. It's a game of windshield time.  Um, which means that they are the team that is probably the most in need of thumb break.

34:27
In order to make sure that they can keep operating the top of their license for as much as possible. Well, I find focusing on giving them that break allows them a chance to kind of recharge their batteries because you never know if someone can be pushed, especially when they're in the field. It's hard to see when they're on their breaking point. So frequent check-ins, you know, we do all company management updates, um, with myself leading in and other executives leading it, uh, once a month.

34:55
So I get to see at least everyone's face and you can see who's looking a little burnt out. Who's a little stressed. Who's engaged and who looks to be disengaged.  And I've spent a lot of time in the field myself because that's my opportunity to again, understand the difference between the facts and the truth as we discussed about before. And also see who needs a break, who, who sounds a little bit burnt out. So there's no substitute for time on the ground. There's no substitute for relationships in forming these perspectives.

35:25
Um, because ultimately your value creation is  going to be executed by or. Able to be executed by that type of person. Makes sense. What do you read? Watch, listen to the recommend others should check out, please.

35:44
ah For reading,  these days I do a blend of  fiction and non-fiction to keep the brain kind of creative for listening these days. You're gonna laugh, but there may be other guests that had some great ones. um

35:59
So I decided that I would pick something that would compliment them. I had been listening to a podcast by a woman called Dr. Becky, who wrote a book called Good Inside. And it's generally focused on how to raise good kids and how to deal with difficult moments with them. But I find that actually also works really well in private expertise. It's been really helpful for me as a parent, but also as a fellow that's running a people driven business.

36:27
I've found there's been a significant link with  running a business and trying to be the best possible parent. um I think it makes you annoyed at other parents who don't try with their children and frustrates you. I think  the common Jim Rowan quote around you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with when you put that into consideration of how well they parent and what you want your child to become out of. It kind of gets put on the fuel on the fire on that front in my opinion.

36:52
If anybody wishes to reach out to you, Jeff, and get in touch, how best do they do so, please? It's great to get me at LinkedIn. You can get me directly at my email at jeff at boardroomsalon.com or via my personal website, jeffhealthcott.com. Well, thank you very much for coming onto the Private Equity Podcast, Jeff. You've left me with a lot to think about and answered a few of my questions I'm working on. So I'm sure everyone listening, he's got some value from there as well.

37:19
level of detail you've gone into and the openness, I genuinely do appreciate it. So thank you very much. It's been my pleasure. Thank you. And thank you very much for everybody yet again for tuning into the Pride Equity Podcast. Until the next time, keep smashing in.