 It all breaks down to how do you communicate with people? Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everybody. Welcome to Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. I am Zach Williams, and I am an awesome guest co-host today. I have Deanna Murphy on the show with me today. Deanna, I don't think we've ever co-hosted a show together. We haven't. This is the first time. You want to introduce our guest today? Absolutely. Zach, we're so excited to have Josh Hendrickson on the show. He is the VP of Sales and Marketing at Wilson Lumber. If you don't already know, Wilson Lumber is a third-generation owned lumber dealer operating out of Huntsville, Alabama. They have been in business servicing the pros since 1949. Josh, the reason we wanted to have you on the podcast today is we keep hearing all of these really cool things about the leadership structure that Wilson Lumber has put into place and embodies. First off, can you just tell us what is the overall Wilson Lumber approach to leadership? Well, we believe that we have to develop and lead our people with their managers. And we've been looking at the accountability chart, which a lot of people call an organizational chart. And we started realizing that leading people is more important than managing people. Developing people is more important than managing people. Rob Wilson really felt passionately about putting together a program to develop leaders internally. And so we partnered with a leadership coach who's a couple hours away and he comes to Wilson Lumber a couple times a quarter to develop people. And this has worked out tremendously for our organization and it doesn't stop there. We also, several of us sit in local boards that develop leaders. One of them is C12, one of them is Advantage Leadership Group. And all these different ways that we can develop our leaders have helped us grow and do a lot of battlefield promotions within the company. But these people are prepared to lead people and grow our company to the scale that we've been. We've grown 20% year over year like a lot of people for the last four or five years. And our company at one time had a goal to hire 100 people in a year. And it was a KPI that we tracked every single week. Net head count gained two people and HR was just buried with hires. But if we didn't have that program in place, there's no way that we could manage that growth effectively. So did you hit the number? Oh yeah, absolutely. Are you finding with that strategy, Josh, that's helping you from like a recruiting perspective like people are hearing about that outside of your organization? Okay, I always think about that in reference to how we treat people and how does it impact our culture and our recruiting. Are you finding that there's like a trickle down effect at all in any way? Yeah, it's interesting. I don't do the first line interviews. I'm usually second or third. And most of the people when I ask them, what brought you to Wilson Lumber, why did you come here? And they always say that most of them say that they've heard about our culture. They hear it's a great place to work. And I'm sure that if you measure those responses and quantified them over years, you would think that 10 years ago, it's probably 20% of the people. But now I would say that it's easily 80 to 90% of the candidates that come through, they already understand the culture that they're getting themselves into. We talk about our culture in every single part of the interview process because it's so important. And we believe that it's okay to hire somebody that may not have the skill set that you need that's a better cultural fit because we can get them there. And I've read studies where companies have done that and they found that they've had much more success in the growth and the strength of their teams by finding that they get a better cultural fit than hiring just the best player on the shelf. As a matter of fact, I was talking to the president of the company today and he was telling me about how when he used to coach soccer, he would have 130 kids try out. He had a narrow down to like 18 or 19 kids and he said getting rid of the first 90 was easy. He said the next 30, they were all about the same. He just picked the people that he felt like he could work the best with and that would get him the best team. And so we kind of do the same approach when we hire around here. But the employees, they know it. We list out all the core values and we don't just stop by reading the core values in our hiring process. We actually have gone so far as to develop statements behind the core values because it's not enough to say one of our core values is do the right thing. Well, that's a very subjective statement. So we explain to them this is what that means to us in our company. Do the right thing means do what's right by everybody involved. Even if it's not best for you or the customer or the employee, we want to do what's most fair for everyone. And so they know and they understand the ground rules when they get here and we realize that that impacts our retention and it impacts the culture. How do you identify once they get in the door who goes into these leadership programs and who doesn't? Any hire that we hire that's not a frontline employee is going to have a disk assessment, a personality profile. And we study those. We've had training on disk assessments, how to read them, how to analyze them. We also do something that's a little unique. It's called a working genius. But that tells what people are capable of, what they love to do and what they really don't like to do. Mine, for example, is galvanizing. I like to bring people together, but I don't have a lot of tenacity. I need somebody next to me that can get the job done. So we take those disk assessments. We take a working genius, for example, and we start to see how those people work and we go back and read those. And a lot of times we'll pick those people and we'll say, hey, we think you'd be a really good fit for this leadership program with Wilson Lumber. And then they go through the first phase of that. And right now we're on the third year, I believe, of that. And second or third class, we had to take a break in COVID and kind of put some gaps in there. But it's a six-month-long course with six different classes that we put them through with this leadership coach. And when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, it all breaks down to how do you communicate with people? How do you like to communicate and how do they receive communication? And managing is just getting along with people, figuring out how to talk to them. So if we can equip them better on how they deliver a message and how people receive it and figure out how to bridge that gap, then it's not that hard to develop leaders. And we've seen a lot of people that have stepped outside of their lane and grown into be some amazing leaders in the company. We're going to release a video about one of them. His name is Brandon Gower, and he's been in the business for a long time. He's still probably in his mid-30s. And he's running a $20, $30 million operation with 100 employees that we just kept pushing him, and he kept taking it on. And now he's just become a rock star for the company. And we're going to release a video about him soon so you guys can jump to Wilson Lumber in our website and our social media and be able to watch that video about Brandon. I'm curious to know, Josh, if you guys modeled this after somebody, like did you read about this and go or hear about it from somebody? Okay, we need to implement this in our organization. Or was this a gradual evolution based upon what you've seen in the organization? You've kind of pioneered it on your own. It's a combination of a couple of things. Patrick Lungione, he talks a lot about leadership. Rob reads a lot of his books. And once he kind of latched onto that, we require that our team read some of his books so they understand what that means. I mentioned some of the boards that were on C12. It's a Christian board group for business owners and they have the ownership level and they have key players. We put a lot of our members through that. I'm on one. And they help us identify those areas and work on those. And so every month when we meet, we'll talk about different things. In some months, it's marketing, but some months it's leadership development. And so that's two of the areas that we've identified that have helped us push this through our company. And from there, we just became passionate about it. And it's a real commitment and investment from the company and from our team members. And once you go through the program, it's not enough as a manager and a leader. I mean, who doesn't need more training to learn how to work better with people and lead people. So we continue to go through more classes. And I just had another class last week and I came out of thinking, man, I didn't expect that. That kind of hit me. And we had a real great takeaway from that class. So it's a constant evolution that I don't think will ever stop in this company. But that's what makes it so great to work here. Josh, I know you guys use the traction framework more for project management. Do you feel like that plays into how your leaders are treated or how they communicate? Yes, traction is throughout the entire company. It's not just project management based for us. We adopted that. I'm going to go say back five years ago on the leadership team. And we started driving it top down. We did it at the leadership level for about two years before we started pushing it down to the next layers of management. Now it's company-wide and without traction it would have been really difficult for us to get through this explosive growth that we've had and to hold people accountable to the things that we've got to get done. We see a lot of your leaders and your leadership on social media. Is that strategic? Is that something that just came about by accident? How did that happen? That was a combination of strategy and we tripped into it. We felt like we needed a stronger presence. And so some of the executives got together and we were talking about it. And there's a couple of us that post regularly that is very intentional that we're wanting people to help understand who we are. We're growing. We're getting into new markets. It's a whole lot easier for people to come work for us or do business with us. And we felt like LinkedIn was a great platform for that. You can certainly put a lot of things out on Facebook or Instagram, but that leaves the door open to going down the path of where people might interpret it a different way or comment on something where you feel like you've got to weigh in on it. And next thing you know, you've got a marketing disaster, but LinkedIn helps keep things really above board and professional. We've been really intentional on those postings to explain who we are, what we do, what our culture is like, what it's like to work here, how we interact with our vendors, with our customers. All those experiences are told through stories on LinkedIn. And we're getting a lot of attention from that. But we've also found that those intentional postings by leaders in the company are now spreading from the employees in the company that just want to do that anyway. And we've seen more posting from other employees that we didn't see a year or two ago. And when we do those postings, we're not saying go like our LinkedIn page or come to Wilson Lumber's website and check us out. We don't do any of that. But we have seen explosive growth in all of our social media platforms and in our website traffic. We've doubled our LinkedIn followers on the Wilson Lumber page. And I think a lot of that is a result of what they're seeing and reading about us on our individual pages. You've got to give people what they want, right? Well, if you have a story, what's the problem in telling it? People like to hear a good story and there's not enough good stories out there. And it's really hard. If you think about LinkedIn in general, it's kind of hard to find a bad story on LinkedIn that at least doesn't have a positive spin at the end. It's not the place for that. And people still respect that platform, but you can go to a lot of other places and you struggle to find positive things to read about. And so LinkedIn is a great place to do that. It's true. You ever seen those memes where it breaks down the subject of what people were talking about in a different way? People talk about it on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn? The differences between these, it's really funny because you're absolutely like on LinkedIn, it's like, oh, this is like typically has like a story arc. This was bad, but then it got better. Or like, I learned this thing and here's what you can do. Like it's typically like ends on a high note, whereas like a lot of other platforms that like degrades into like the worst parts of humanity. And you know, it's really quite funny. Well, you certainly have to understand as a business and social media marketing, you've got to understand those platforms and which one you need to use for what audience and what tone you need to use when you send those messages. We spent a lot of time reviewing those different platforms internally and trying to figure out which one is the right one to use for the right message. Yeah, that's interesting because you know, probably different parts of your audience are on different channels. Like specifically I'm thinking of LinkedIn, you're going to get a professional crowd, but then Facebook and Instagram, you might get a little bit more of let's say the contractor or the pro who's spending more time there. Do you have a thought process of where you guys are investing your time from a social media standpoint? Our business model is builders that are going to spend a certain volume with us, repetitive business, regularity that kind of aligns us with pro builders. Typically, it doesn't mean that, you know, we don't market to somebody who's going to build their dream home or somebody who's going to have a large remodel. But the bulk of our business are going to be people that are in the business to build houses and they've been doing that for their career. And so when you go to market, it makes it a little bit unique to try to connect with those people. There's ways that we'll connect with their customer. And a lot of times we'll use Facebook for that or Instagram for that when we want to reach their client, even though our target customer is the builder. But other times we're using LinkedIn to connect with our vendors, with industry players out there and with some of the multifamily clients that may not have as much of a presence. And it's important when you're marketing, not just to try to market to your customers. You know, who doesn't want a better price for something that they buy? Who does it, especially in COVID, who doesn't want a partner that's going to position them with material when there's material shortages? So we really value the LinkedIn presence a lot because it gets right to those people. But we do use Instagram, Facebook. We've got a TikTok account. We haven't made any TikToks yet. Off of this episode, we're going to make you one. We have that ready. And we're working on a strategy to utilize Facebook and Instagram more to figure out how to connect more to our builder's customers to drive the business that way. Josh, if you're a listener who's listening to this episode, I imagine they're thinking, oh, wow, this is pretty incredible what these guys have pulled off. What's the one piece of advice you would give somebody who's listening to this episode saying, hey, yeah, I want to elevate my leadership. I want to make sure that that gets heard and seen in the marketplace to make sure we're communicating the right thing about our business. What's the one piece of advice you would give people? Be intentional. Have a team. Work on that team. Make sure that everybody's lock and stack. Outline the objective and write down a mission statement of where you want your leadership team to be and make those goals clear and defined for everybody in the company so that they understand where they need to be as leaders in the company. And then just work on it. Constantly never stop. And if you've got great stories to tell, tell the story. Don't be shy about it because you never know when the next great leader is going to walk in the door and want to start on the sales counter or going to want to start on the yard pulling lumber. And the next thing you know, they're going to be running a $50 million operation. But if you don't promote them, they're not going to feel love. They're not going to feel cared about. They're not going to know that you even care or notice when you might notice every single day. So you've got to be intentional about everything. We all went through the great resignation together. Did you guys feel an impact from that? How did you keep employees through that? How did you keep growing your leaders through that? I would say we felt it in a different way than a lot of companies felt. I really feel like it. Wilson Lumber people held on a little tighter. We worked a little harder. You know, we got to know each other a little bit better. It was tough, but we figured it out and we didn't lose a lot of people. We certainly lost people. I mean, everybody has turnover, especially when you do the amount of manufacturing that we do. But our turnover has reduced year over year. And that's because of how hard we worked at it. I think COVID just made us a better company in the end than most companies. And it exposed a lot of things with people. It exposed weaknesses, areas that you just had to step up and get it done. And those were the times that we identified that's the next leader. That's the guy that was looking for something to get into that came with a solution and not a problem. And we just kept seeing that over and over and over again in our company. And it was pretty exciting to go through as tough as it was. It was an exciting time. That's so cool. I've never heard anyone say that COVID made us a better company. That's really great. Well, that's actually kind of disappointing because it was a huge opportunity for people and they missed it. Josh, man, thank you so much for coming on the show. If someone wants to connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that? They can email me at jhendrickson at wilsonlumber.net. You can go to our website, jump to our Contact Us page. That'll get back to my team. Also, check out me on LinkedIn. Do a lot of posts on there. Josh, man, thank you again so much for coming on the show. And Deanna, thank you for co-hosting with me. Thanks for having me. For our listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, check us out at venue.com slash podcast to subscribe to get more. Until next time, I'm Zach Williams alongside Deanna Murphy. Thanks, everybody.