Speaking and Communicating Podcast

People will leave a company for culture, and they'll leave a company for money, but they'll never come back only for money if they left for culture. Culture is the most defining element of significant company financial success.

Welcome back to The Speaking and Communicating Podcast. I am your host, Roberta Ndlela. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning in to.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development. And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify and leave us a rating and a review. Now let's get communicating.

Now let's get communicating with our guest today, who is Michael Fortinberry, joining us from New York.

He is the co-founder and president of Protiv, the champion of authentic leadership, who helps us transform culture, especially in the construction industry.

Michael is here to talk to us about how we can use technology to make the workplace more human-centered. And he will be sharing with us some leadership strategies as well. And before I go any further, please welcome him to the show.

Hi, Michael.

Roberta, super excited to be here. Very, very nice to talk to you today.

And I'm delighted that you're here too. Welcome. Thank you so much.

Please introduce yourself to our listeners. Sure.

My name is Michael and I live here in New York, as you mentioned. I've had a pretty interesting career, came out of the US Army and then started a couple of companies around technology.

And also worked within the multifamily real estate space and in the construction space around multifamily. So I learned to speak technology, I learned to speak real estate, learned to speak construction.

And the combination of those has kind of led me to this current venture, which we've got called Protiv that we started about three years ago.

And what is the basis of Protiv? What is your mission exactly?

So Protiv was something we started as an internal project at our construction company in New York City. We had about 130 people in the field doing large scale multi-family renovation work in New York City.

As you might imagine, Roberta, sometimes Bob would come in. I'm going to make a lot of fun of Bob today. Bob will come into the office and say, hey, can I have a raise?

I'm like, oh, goodness, right? Now conflict occurs in your head. Do I give Bob a raise?

You know, do I not give Bob a raise? Bob really wants a raise. He's been here for, you know, a week, a year, 10 years.

I realized if I give Bob a raise, the only thing that happens is my costs go up. Bob's behavior doesn't really change. He doesn't really do anything different because he got a raise.

He's just has a raise. I haven't connected it to something. I haven't linked that to anything different from Bob.

So what we found was that we instead kind of pivoted over towards, and you know, my metaphoric Bob here, if you can finish these jobs ahead of schedule and do the job well, how about I share the savings with you?

And that's how you can get your raise. And so what we did is we started connecting our KPIs, the things that made a difference to our financial output, to incentives for our workers. And we made it very transparent.

We're very clear, like this is how we make money. And if you guys can help us make more, I'm just going to share it with you. And here's how much I'm going to share with you.

And so they could see it. And when they could see it, it started to become their money. My conversations evolve, right?

Now, when Bob comes by, Bob is like, hey, Mike, you need to make sure you have those materials there on time, so I can finish this job ahead of schedule, so that I can make more money.

When I go visit Bob, I'm like, hey, Bob, are you making any money on this job? How's it going against your budget? I've changed the dynamic with the crew to there.

They have some ownership now in how the job goes. And what I find is that hourly pay, if you kind of take it back to its root cause problem, incentivizes time.

It doesn't incentivize teamwork, it doesn't incentivize communication, or it doesn't incentivize production or quality. It just incentivizes time. I work more time, I get more money.

That's not a good equation. I don't like that. They don't even like that.

I have to stay longer and work harder. Why? What if I just work smarter and communicate better and be a better teammate?

Then we finish jobs at a schedule, now we can all make more money. That shift was monumental for our company. It materially changed our financial trajectory.

So much so that we started a software company to help other contractors do the same thing.

There is so much to unpack there. Let's start with the first one. I worked in construction as well.

I remember when they bid for a job and they price everything, the construction companies. We used to have a timeline as you say, okay, you will finish the job within six months.

I remember that there were penalties if they went beyond the six months for each day, that the construction job wasn't done. But I don't remember them if they finished early if there was savings or more money to be made.

So you worked for a general contractor, didn't you?

I worked for consulting engineers so that we used to manage the construction companies on behalf of the client. Yes.

So imagine putting yourself in the shoes of the electrician who bid that job. The electrician bid that job. He bid the job and thinks it's going to cost $100 in labor when he bid it or $10,000 or $10 million.

Then he's going to send his five electricians over there to start working on your project. They're paid by the hour. So you bid the job from the owner, you know, and then you've got it subcontracted to an electrician who gave you a price.

But now at the end of that train, I have a worker working by the hour. So I've broken this relationship to the budget because the last person who actually does the work isn't in that party. They're in a different party.

They're on the hourly party. It's not their money. Their money is their time.

And so they don't look at it and say, well, I really want to be done in six months. They're like, I'm done when I'm done. If it takes longer, I get paid either way.

Now, what if I change that dynamic and they've got ownership in it because they knew that if I finish in five and a half months instead of six months, those two weeks of savings gets shared with me and my coworkers. I have to do the job right.

So I can't skip steps. All my things have to be done correctly. They turn the light switch on and doesn't work.

I don't get paid. So I want to hold my teammates accountable to quality. And what I've done is I created a new conversation within the organization about production, teamwork, accountability.

It is a very different culture in that organization once you make that shift.

Once there's a sense of ownership. As you were saying, if it's hourly, they take smoke breaks. They don't care because they're still getting money.

It's not their money.

It's not their money.

The sense of ownership, the accountability. Now, if you've had that culture all along, how do you then as a leader start to make that shift? How do you begin this conversation?

Because like you said, they even start to make recommendations on how to be more productive, how to do things more efficiently.

I get drawn into a lot of this type of almost coaching with some of my clients because you start talking about culture, especially in certain types of industries. They don't even always know what that means exactly.

Like they've used the word in a sentence, but that's different than understanding what is company culture. I think you have to start with an understanding of what does that term mean? I often describe it as the personality of your company.

Now, if you know anything about human-human interactions, right? And that's why I go out on a date and I'm going to put on my best behavior. My personality is my best behavior today.

It's like when you hire a new employee, you really want to hire Bob and so you put on your best face. Bob, we're a great company. We have great feedback loops and a great culture.

And we're going to buy you lunch on Fridays and blah, blah, blah. You're putting your best foot forward on your date, your best foot forward with your new employees and your public messaging to your prospective customers.

But is that who you really are as a person? Do you know what happens after date six, right? Or six months after the wedding ring goes on?

Like, wait a second, you were so nice to me at the beginning and now you're not. My wife still loves me, so we're good.

But you have to understand that you have to be authentic because that's the only thing that is sustainable in the culture you're building. So I talk a lot about authenticity. So you look as a leader, I need to look inward at who you are.

And if your belief is that the most important thing is finishing the job on time, and it's not that we get home to our families on time, then okay, that's cool, then that's your culture.

Don't pretend your culture is we want to make sure Bob gets to his kid's baseball game on time. Because that's not your culture.

Your culture is we're going to put our customer out there first, and we're going to finish this job on time no matter what, and we will stay through the night to get the work done. That's our culture. I'm not saying that's the wrong culture.

I'm just saying that if that's who you are, if that's the way you view work and your company and your ideology of how to be successful, great. You need to build on that because that's who you are.

I think authenticity is something that trips a lot of people up when they say, okay, we're going to have a culture of X, but then it doesn't materialize into actual action.

Whether you're looking to implement a performance based system, we're looking to determine whether we work four days a week or five days a week, whatever those decision points are, how we're going to communicate, how we're going to share information

financially with our teams, whatever those decision points are about building your company, it needs to be grounded in reality of your personal culture that you can consistently deliver every day. That's authentic. That's easily sustainable.

The onus is on the leader to basically start this whole self-awareness journey, know exactly who they are and what's going on in their company, in their culture, in their team, so that if they do bring someone new, then they will tell them exactly

There's a common phrase that people will leave a company for culture and they'll leave a company for money, but they'll never come back only for money if they left for culture.

It is, in fact, from a business school standpoint, culture is the most defining element of significant company financial success.

You just layer all the different things you might measure, and the one that has the biggest direct correlation between oversized company success or not is culture. Companies with great culture over perform across the board. It is that important.

Some of the stats were outrageous type. I can't remember them all, so I won't try and quote them. But the performance level you can get from great culture can't be overstated.

So we were talking before we started that you also have to know your numbers. Financial control is critical. I talked to a lot of small business owners that don't have great financial controls, and you need to have great financial controls.

I would be a worse CFO. I know that. But I do know that I have to have someone around who's really, really good at the numbers.

So make sure you have your numbers under control and build a great company culture. And if you're making whiffleball bats, or you're building stereo speakers, or you're running a construction company, great. It's all going to be applicable.

Master your numbers, build a great culture. So that's a little bit of diversionary off the normal communication track.

No, actually, that's very relevant, because like we always say, it's great to talk about communication, the soft skills, the leadership, but the company needs to be profitable for it to continue to exist. It's a going concern.

But it's very important, like you said, if you know that this is the culture that I'm entering into, and you can ask yourself, does it align with me?

Because I remember I had a guest who worked in Wall Street, and in Wall Street, they drop F-bombs every second word. And that's the culture. So it's not like there's one definition of what a culture should be like.

I actually have several friends who are Wall Street folks here in New York City, and one of them was telling me a story one night that he'd been at his company, one of the big trading houses for, I think he told me, let's say it was five years at

that point. And he had never missed a day for being sick, and he had gone in deathly sick many times, because it wasn't acceptable to miss a day because you're sick. And he said one time, he literally woke up in the hospital.

He said, work one moment. And in the hospital, when he wakes up, it's like, yeah, we just found you on the floor in your office, you know, because he works because of course it didn't matter. He was unbelievably sick.

He's like, so what did you do? He said, I got back to work the next day. Culture, that's their culture.

They're working at 11 o'clock at night down in Wall Street. That is completely acceptable. That's the norm.

That's just what they do. That is the culture. And OK, fine.

That's what they do. I just encourage everybody out there to be authentic to who you are and the kind of company you want to have.

And then you'll find that over a long period of time, that's a very sustainable thing that you can deliver for your employees.

That's your almost your primary job as the leader, especially your company grows, is to set the tone for who you are because you have people doing the work. What's the strategies? What is the tone?

What is the personality of the product you're delivering? You have to set that. You have to be consistent about that.

So I would really encourage those leaders out there listening to dig deep on that, understand who you are. I'm not saying you got to go do psychotherapy to understand your childhood trauma, but be on top of who you are.

Right. Now, just a little side note with regards to your friend from Wall Street. I'm South African, so obviously labor laws are different from what they are in the United States.

But, you know, we have a certain number of days to cleave annually, a certain number of vacation days. So for five years, he never took sick leave.

Yeah, they don't do that. The other day is off when the markets closed. But the Wall Street culture is a very unique thing.

And one, they're being paid enormous amounts of money. And frankly, if they don't like it, they're welcome to not work here. You know, if you don't like your million dollar bonuses, then feel free to go work somewhere else.

Home Depot is always hiring. You know, that would be the kind of conversation. I don't even know if they'd have that.

I think if you even brought it up, they'd be like, yeah, you know, we'd need your key card. So it's because you're not going to fit in. That's just not what we do.

What we do here is we work. And especially until you make more senior levels and then you take long lunches and, you know, have your house up in the Hamptons. But it's a price you pay to get there.

I'm not really advocating that. I don't work that way, although I guess I do work every day. But I guess I don't really work like that in my own life.

So why would I ask all my people to do that? I tend to be a very non-micro-manager. I give people very broad latitude to accomplish the objectives that we have.

And I can't change that to someone else. I can't micromanage one of my team members and give everybody else a lot of free reign. So I don't want a whole bunch of micromanagement.

I don't enforce that upon others. It's my approach to doing it.

Which means the very people that you hire, you look for people who don't need to be micromanaged in order to be productive.

Yes. Must have a very deeply embedded work ethic that they want to be successful and that they will problem solvers mostly.

Because as a startup, when you start a software company or any company really, but especially a software company, you better be real adept at problem solving. Because every day is something. All right.

This is a journey. When you're building a venture capital back software company is ridiculously hard to do. And there's a reason why the vast, vast, vast majority of them fail.

And we're trying to achieve that one in 10,000 kind of success story. It's definitely hard.

Congratulations though. So back to the bonus part when we were talking about Wall Street, you say some of us cannot handle the big bonus. Why?

You know what we get wrong about bonuses is that we often attach them to behaviors that the employee doesn't understand.

They don't understand what generates gross profit or what your cogs are. And the other time they don't understand maybe business school stuff and financial data.

But then we're tying a bonus to something that they don't fully understand how it's calculated. The other thing we do wrong in creating bonuses is we disconnect the payment to the behavior. So it's so remote.

In other words, an annual bonus. My behavior in April isn't going to change based on an annual bonus. Not for a per crew to make $17 an hour.

They're worried about what they make on Friday. And so we've got to connect behaviors very transparently, very simply, and very frequently to the reward. If I can get my crew to work different this week, they make more money this week.

That consistent behavior of evolution tied to reward is what creates this kind of ongoing, consistent evolution to their performance.

Back to that sense of ownership again.

Yes, ma'am.

Right. Now let's talk about the technology that you use in order to help companies create this culture. Would you like to walk us through that?

Sure.

So as I just talked about, actually, this is kind of a good opening. When you have a bonus program, it needs to be very transparent, very simple, and it's got to be somewhat frequent.

We also think it has to be integrated into the way you already do business.

If I'm just have a spreadsheet somewhere and I'm manually entering information and trying to track things, and those are not sustainable processes, especially in a bigger company.

So what we've found is that I need to integrate into existing operating tools.

We tend to plug our system into platforms like QuickBooks, etc., lots of different construction tools, time tracking tools, so that we can extract data on what your company is doing today. How much did you think you were going to spend?

How much did you actually spend? That kind of stuff. The other thing I do is I want to show that to people in the field.

So therefore, the app that they have on their phone needs to be very easy for them to understand. How much time do we have for this job? How much have we used?

What's left? How much of that money is mine based on when I think we're going to finish?

So we make it really easy in the field for a crew member, if they want, to actually look at the job details, understand the budget, and understand how much money are they going to make personally on their paycheck next Friday if they do X.

They get to set X. That's the best part. They get to decide, I'm going to get this done on Thursday.

So the following Friday, I know that I'm going to make an extra $75, which is going to make my wife happy because she said, baby needs shoes or whatever.

So there's this connection between what I can see and touch and control in my own life and what I'm going to make. You've got to be connected to other broad parts of the business.

Do I do a good job with my risk mitigation and controlling my workers' comp rates or my office space leases renegotiated well so our costs come down? Stuff that they have no connection to that relates to our net profit at the end of the year.

It's too separated. They don't control that. They control how many of these junction boxes am I going to install today as an electrician?

There's a very direct connection to their behavior. That's really important.

Yes. Because once you have a sense of ownership, you look at everything differently.

Even your perspective on the work, the profitability of the company, and how it ties back to your pay is a very different mindset compared to, yes, I'll do the eight hours a day, five days a week and go home.

It's interesting too because a lot of leaders, business owners, they have a stake in the ground that says something like, our customers come first. I find it interesting because as leaders, truth is, I don't personally take care of my customer.

I have some people who take care of my customer. Or maybe I'm like, well, my shareholders come first and I don't know, I don't actually make the money in the company. I have some people that do that and that goes into the bank account.

So I tend to find that the right stake in the ground is, I'm going to put my people first. I'm going to take care of them. And I'm going to do everything I can to support them and what they want to do in life.

And that I'm going to care about them so much that they're going to reward me by caring about what they do in my company. And we're going to share in that experience.

And when I can do that, I put my people first, not my customer, not my shareholder, my people. Now, my people are going to then do a better job delivering my product.

And my product makes my customer happy, and my customer pays me, which makes my shareholders happy. So I can give everybody's happy by taking care of my people.

Please, can we do that equation again? Because I think it's very important. So where does it start?

I believe it starts with taking care of your people.

Now, some people might think it's taking care of your management team, who takes care of your people. But we'll skip through that to the S&B world, where we take care of our people directly. So we're going to take care of our people.

Because our people actually deliver the product or service that you're selling to your customer. And that product or service, because they now do a great job delivering it, because they feel cared about, is now taking care of your customer.

Because the customer feels taken care of by your staff, by the product they delivered, the service they delivered. Now they're willing to pay you. And if they're willing to pay you, you can actually make money.

And if you make money, your shareholders are happy. Or you personally, or your wife, or whoever. You know, I make my wife happy because the company is doing well.

I don't really work for myself. I work for her. All of these things are how we actually get to the things we want.

I think it was Zig Ziglar. He's like, if you help enough other people get what they want, you can have anything you want. That's right.

Is that a Ziglar thing? I think it's a Ziglar thing.

Yeah, Zig Ziglar said it.

Yeah. So it's great. It's great stuff.

I love the way you said that and how everything ties back.

Because a lot of the time, I think so many companies are caught in the, we work for shareholders, we work for investors first before anything else.

But if you really want to make them happy, you better take care of your people. And there are probably a host of disaster stories that could be documented by some aspiring MBA student of companies that failed to take care of their people.

And it spirals.

Back to the circle you've just painted for us, then the shareholders are not taking care of. Because at the end of the day, it's the people that are connected to the customers and that do the work.

And I think you need to be a master of your craft. I think that you need to have a space in the market and a unique selling proposition and all the other things that go along with bringing a product to market, a service to market.

You have to be priced appropriately. You have to understand your margins. There are all kinds of layers to execution on that.

But if you put it the center of it, I'm going to take care of my team. I'm going to make sure they understand they're central to the way that I view the world as a leader. You're going to get a different level of performance from them.

Absolutely.

What about the dynamics of teamwork in the construction industry? Is it easy for everybody to get along?

Probably no more easy than any other human dynamic, I guess. But there can be a sense of camaraderie in the construction space, especially when you view your trade as a craft. Like that I have cultivated a skill set to frame a home.

I've cultivated a skill set to install a roof or to wire up a data center or to plumb a hospital's gas system. These are tradesmen at a certain point that, frankly, the world can't live without.

If anything, I think we'll be the last bastion against AI. The last thing that gets replaced will be the plumber putting in a new water heater in your basement.

We're a long way from a robot going down my basement steps to put the water heater in, right? So now my water heater may be talking to my network, talking to AI about how much hot water I'm using.

But whatever, somebody's got to, Bob is still got to go install it, right? He's got to bring a wrench. And a robot's not doing a very good job of that yet.

It's so funny because if you really wanted to project the next class of millionaires and multimillionaires, there are people starting trade contracting businesses today.

If you're a young firebrand right out of business school and you're like, I want to make money, if you go into banking, you're going to be bankrupt. Good luck getting a finance job four years and five years from now.

Because of all the tech, the AI and everything is automated.

It's making them go away. It's going to be one-twentieth of the employees to do the work they do today. Same thing with lawyers.

If you want to be a multi-millionaire when you're 40, go start a plumbing company. Have 50 people working for you and you'll probably retire at 39 with a house and wherever you want it to be, on a ski slope or a beach.

That's not unrealistic and private equity firms are going to come in and buy it from you. You'll be done. That's a path to retirement at 40, the way that we used to look at Goldman Sachs.

We don't hear that very often.

As an option, at least, I'm not saying it's the only one, but as an option, I know that there is a bit of discussion that has started with that whole, if you don't go to college, trades are still an option when we actually need more plumbers and

Yes, we're 800,000 short right now.

Wow, in the United States.

In the US, we have 800,000 employees shortfall in the US for skilled trade contractors.

If you look across all trade service type industries, from cleaning, landscaping, etc., it's more than that. But yeah, it's just a huge hole in the market. It's growing demand on top of that, we need more of them.

They're an aging workforce because we have too many of them are older, not enough kids going into it. So again, aging workforce, moving closer to retirement, not enough kids going in, and growing demand, already a shortage.

Okay, so go back to your economics 101, and you'll understand why that equation sets up really well to take your business school degree and go start a trade contracting business.

Go find your friend Chip from school, or Bob, or whoever, who was a contractor and you're like, hey, you're a plumber, right? You know, I've got this money from my dad, I'm going to start a business. You want to go into business together?

Bring a business school guy knowing the numbers and a trade contractor who can understand the trade itself. That's a recipe for success. Private equity is pouring money into landscaping and HVAC, plumbing, electrical acquisitions.

Business models are amazing. Software is getting better. These are real, real career paths for these guys.

You're thinking about, I don't want to be a landscaper. Yeah, you do. You do want to be a landscaper.

Right now is a great time to be a landscaper. You know how much a landscaping company with about 40 employees is doing a bunch of commercial work in Wichita's worth? It will get a huge check.

Huge.

Michael, you should teach a business class.

I probably will in my next career whenever I'm done with this.

A lot of kids would benefit for sure. Any last words of wisdom for construction companies who want to improve their culture and create this sense of ownership?

Yeah. When you think about putting your people first, what does that even mean? How does it matter?

Like, what's that? Do that in real life? You need to understand what they want in their life.

You're going to have employees that want to master what they do today, so they get great work-life balance. They don't really want a lot more responsibility. They want to master it.

They want to get a little bit more money each year, so that eventually their job is easy for them and their home on time, because that's just what they want. You have other people that really don't want to work for you.

They really want to start their own shop, and because they're very entrepreneurial. Okay, and you have others that want your job. You have someone else in the company that actually wants you to retire, so they can have your job.

You need to find a way to help all three of them get what they want. But you have to understand what it is. You actually have to ask.

And I don't mean just what do you want to be in five years. Get deeper into it, about their families, where they want to go in their lives, what's important to them.

Unpack that as deep as you can in your organization and understand it, and you can then facilitate them getting there. And they will reward you with the kind of loyalty you can't even imagine.

And so many leaders are looking for loyalty from their teams.

I need them because I'm trusting, but that's part of my management style too. I'm going to trust you to go do what I ask you to do. All right?

I need you to care about it. And so you need to know that I care about you. And I'm willing to trade that every day.

I'm willing to care about them. They're willing to care about what we're building. We do that together.

It's a great world. It's pretty powerful.

Yes, but it does make a huge difference. It certainly does.

Yes, ma'am.

Thank you so much, Michael, for being here today. Before you go, would you like our listeners to reach out to you online?

Sure. They're welcome to. I'm really easy to find.

LinkedIn, Michael Fortinberry. There's not a whole lot of us out there. Michael at protiv.com is my email.

If anybody wants to just email me, they get questions, whether it's about Protiv or just about starting your company and you got questions about whatever. And I've done this nine times now, so I'm somewhat seasoned in the whole start a company thing.

And I'm two and a half for nine is my track record. So in case of I was curious how hard this is to do.

Wow, that's wonderful. What a track record. Michael Fortinberry on LinkedIn and Michael at protiv.com.

I will put that on the show notes. Thank you so much, Michael, for being here today.

You got it anytime.

My pleasure. Thank you for joining us on the Speaking and Communicating Podcast once again. Please log on to Apple and Spotify, leave us a rating and a review and what you'd like for us to discuss on the show that will be of benefit to you.

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