Kunik - A Conversation About Culture
This episode is brought to you by Bastiat Partners, a boutique investment banking firm. Bastiat Partners was cofounded by Nader Afshar, a friend of the pod. Nader is described as a connector, a low key version of Byron Trot, and the rare investment banker that truly cares about aligning incentives among all parties. See https://bastiatpartners.com/.
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Bill: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Business Brew. I'm your host, Bill Brewster. This episode features Josh Horowitz and Liz Gulliver of Kunik. I'm not going to give a long preview of this pod, because I think it's a good one, and y'all should just put it on and listen. Josh and Liz are great and I wish them much future success. Some buy siders that have started a venture and I think it will be an enjoyable conversation for you to listen to.
As always, none of this is financial advice. All of the information contained in this program is for entertainment purposes only. Please consult your financial advisor before making investment decisions and do your own due diligence. Josh Horowitz and Liz Gulliver, how are you doing?
Josh: Yeah, I'm doing great. How are you doing, Bill?
Bill: Well, we just got done talking about how I'm a mess, but I'm great.
[laughter]
Bill: I think it would be helpful to frame the conversation to talk about where you both came from and then, we'll get into what you're doing now, if that makes sense. So, Liz, do you want to give some career background and then, I don't know, if you want to get into it, get into it but I don't know. I think it's good to frame, where you're coming from or where you're going.
Liz: I love it and I'm much younger than Josh. I have way less career background to talk about.
Josh: [laughs]
Bill: I like it.
Liz: [laughs] No, I'm kidding. Josh and I both came from finance. I was an investment consulting before, went to business school, which is where I had the great pleasure of meeting Josh and now, my co-founder. Well, during school, I worked in hedge funds and after school, I went to Citibank and worked with them in primarily treasury and risk in three different offices, New York, Banamex, and Mexico City for three years and then, Miami. And it was after the location back to Miami that I finally ended my career in finance and pivoted into Kunik, which we'll dive into in a minute. But I'll let Josh share his background first.
Josh: Yes, so, it's funny. My career has taken me from the end of a company to now the beginning of a company. It's a cool way to think about it. I started on the buyside. I worked at Perry in 2006 doing risk arb and merger arb, which was super fun. And then, I ended up at Citi's prop desk, which was Lord of the Flies. And then, I went to Columbia with Liz and I did the value investing program there and then, worked for a deep value buyside firm actually in Vancouver with a global mandate, which was super cool. And then went and started a company with Liz. It went from the end of a company's life from risk arb. They're dead to deep value fundamental five-year hold type of stuff and then, took the plunge to start my own business, which is a wild ride.
Bill: I like it.
Josh: [laughs]
Bill: I don't know you and I had interacted a number of times, but we started to really interact around the Qurate time, when I sent a write up and you're like, "This is basically the write up I did three years ago just so you know."
Josh: Yeah, I think I sent it to you.
Bill: Yeah, you did.
Josh: Yeah, because I started looking at it when they were around [unintelligible [00:04:05] and it was probably the low mid 20s or something that time and it's so funny. These are the exact same.
Bill: Yeah.
Josh: It just happened to be that you were buying it 60% cheaper than when I was looking at it or early the stock price. I don't know if the fundamentals changed that much. Yeah, that was wild. But it comes back. It's funny, too. People were so bold up on CVS, I remember probably a year ago and the thesis was the same. The short answer is that timing matters, but a lot of these things, it's so interesting.
Liz: Well, we were just in Atlanta at a conference and we ran into a business school friend, who's still in finance. Yeah, you can tell the story better. After too many beers, still stole his punch line.
Josh: Yeah, we walked in from a dinner and there was a guy that was in the value program with me. I was like, "Man, that really looks like Eric Liz" and she's like, "Oh, no," and then, he screamed, and shouted, and drew us in. He was down there pitching a bunch of-- They are all mid cap type of investors and he's pitching me these theses. I was like, "Oh, is it just because it's an inflation hedge?" He's like, "You mother--" Like, "Of course."
Bill: [laughs]
Josh: But it was like, "You still got it." You can still steal thesis. I think that's what it looks like. The more seasoned you are, the more quickly you can just figure out exactly what the thesis is of why he was pitching it, but it's pretty funny. Yeah, I think he was looking at a pricing plus inflation type hedge business and I was like, "Oh, of course. Yeah, that makes sense."
Bill: They're popular now. Inflation is not going away. I said, it's like the new COVID. It just lingers.
Josh: Yeah, exactly.
Bill: Now, we're going to get a little banner.
Liz: Charming.
Bill: Yeah, Spotify is going to give us a banner that warns everybody that I said the word, but whatever.
Liz: [laughs]
Josh: We're cool with it.
Bill: What made the two of you get together and decide to start this company and what does the company do, is probably also a good question?
Liz: Yeah. The company does culture development. We partner with employers to help them build sustainable, scalable cultures that can work from anywhere. When everybody's working remote and for everyone with inside an organization. We'll dive into much more what that looks like, but it's a lot of customized programming, consulting. The real answer to where it came from is, I was in LA with my husband, who also went to business school, having dinner with Josh trying to set him up with a friend too, that didn't work out. But instead, we got a company out of it.
Josh: [laughs]
Liz: We were talking about all of our friends from business school where people were going, "How many people?" I guess, what, Josh, three years out of business school at that point and how many people just a handful of years out were already leaving their companies for various reasons, which got us talking about company culture, what we liked or didn't like at our company cultures and what we were seeing.
Josh: Yeah, we were both in unique positions, where I had joined-- I'd just-- Don't need to get into it, but I joined a new fund in LA to be the right-hand man of this guy, who then promptly got fired and then, I just basically asked to get paid out. We were both at these weird transition points, Liz too was thinking about leaving. I think the conversation really got down to was, I spent, I don't know, like, 12, 13 years working on the buyside. I grew up playing team sports. I was always that orientation of a mindset. Even when I played tennis, I like playing doubles, where they're like playing singles. I never had a good boss, like ever. I never had a good manager. I think Liz was feeling the same way, especially being a woman in finance or who are the leaders at a big bank that are women, who are moms who were talking about it. There was none of that human element.
In the buyside, what makes you a great analyst, maybe you can transfer to a big PM and that's a big switch. But then, all of a sudden, if you're a portfolio manager and you're running a team of, I don’t know, five people or 10 people, you're also a people manager. That's a skill that's not ever taught at all. And then, even as you move up, if you're going to start running a fund and you have 150 people or if you're a larger mutual fund, you could have thousands, that's a totally different skill set. It was so incongruent with my experience. They're like, "This is just so messed up." We were seeing this be an issue across the board as well. We're like, "Something's really wrong. Let's dig into figure out what this is and how do you actually start creating a different type of culture inside companies, where people can really grow?" I think people are aged, almost turning 40, Liz is in her mid-30s, and I'd say people our age and younger have a very different orientation to their relationship between work, and life, and family than people our parents' age.
Bill: Yeah.
Liz: Well, that and I think-- Yeah, sorry. Go-- [crosstalk]
Bill: No, as you guys were talking, I was just thinking that I noticed-- There's a lot of times that the best salesperson gets promoted, but the best salesperson is probably best suited as a salesperson and not necessarily a manager.
Josh: Yeah, this is the Peter principle. You get promoted to your level of incompetence.
Bill: You get what? Promoted to your level of incompetence or competence?
Josh: Yeah, no, incompetence.
Bill: Huh?
Liz: No, it's unfortunately, incompetence.
Bill: Interesting.
Josh: Why because you got pushed up into a level, where you can no longer go.
Bill: Yeah, huh?
Josh: Yeah.
Liz: And they're not usually good teachers. The people who get promoted up are not usually very empathetic. They're not usually great teachers, especially as Josh was saying, as a woman in finance, but he didn't say as I was thinking about having kids at that point in time. I think, yes, there's been a generational shift in how people think about it, but I also think in general and more traditional industries like finance, law, companies like that, people still today are not talking that much about, "Okay, this is what that might look for a career, these are ways you might come back from a paternity leave or maternity leave and reintegrated, and here's how you think about that."
When you don't have people to have that conversation with, it's really hard to see how you're going to progress and keep going. Consequently, you just see a lot of people continuing to off ramp and you hear companies talk about, "We need more female leaders or we need more diversity at the top." But there's a big gap in terms of how they're continuing to make those people feel part of the conversation, like, part of the inclusive culture in there. Without totally realizing it at the time, that's what we were talking about at dinner and what led us to think, "Gosh, this has got to be not only a better outcome for companies and employers, but also just better for business, if you can retain talent and find ways to keep them in there, instead of replacing them."
Bill: Some of the women that I talk to that were in law had an interesting insight to me, at least, where they were like, "The only women that we see that were successful" This is I don't know, probably nine years ago, eight years ago, or whatever, maybe only five, but whatever. They all blend together. They said basically the women that that were senior were women that were not supported. So, they almost were like, "You know what? Screw you. You have to go through what I went through in order to make it here too. Nothing's given," which I thought was an interesting insight.
Liz: The real backstory on Kunik, too, is that, now, we do culture development. We started by supporting working parents and really thinking about how to keep, because that is our demographic. It's also the biggest off ramp for all employers as working parents, primarily women, but parents in general. There's almost nothing out there that focuses on how to keep that talent over time. Any kind of benefit that's out there is really focused on one segment. Women during one particular period, pregnancy, and sometimes immediate post birth. But to your point, when we started the company, Josh and I, we don't come from HR, we don't come from benefits, we come from finance as we said. We were complete outsiders. But as finance geeks, we did a lot of due diligence, and we talked to thousands of working parents, and we did keep hearing a lot.
Well, I have a female manager and she has kids, but she's very much stiff upper lip. You've just got to do it, because I did it and you've got to get through here. We actually heard that really pretty often. I'm not surprised that you heard that from lawyers that certainly, I think again, probably more so in finance and law than you might tech, for example. But that's something we heard a lot of was, "There wasn't anything to support me, so, why should we change things now to support you," which is something that you have to push against and takes time to shape and change?
Bill: Yeah. I think it's interesting how things that can continue to perpetuate themselves, even though objectively, the person that went through it didn't like it, but they also don't want to change it.
Josh: Yeah. This is everywhere. I somehow avoided working in investment banking. But it's hazing. You're joining a fraternity when you're right out of college. You're going to do nothing till 5 o'clock on a Friday. And then, all of a sudden, an MD is going to drop a thing and say, "I need to abide Monday," and all of a sudden, your weekends ruined and you are working 48 hours straight. But it's the same culture. It's like, "How do you shift these things away from--?" Everybody knows that's not the right way to do it, but it gets perpetuated.
Bill: Yeah. My man, @frankyfourfingers on Twitter. He had an interesting comment that from the MD side defended that culture a little bit, I think. But I think he would acknowledge that it's not great. I sat on the floor with the investment banking guys and it's just crazy. From three to five, they'd have nothing to do. And 5 o'clock it's like, "All right, turn these books quick." Then, you go in the midnight and they're still there. It's not.
Josh: Yeah, the great thing about the buyside is that, there's an independent scoreboard. I never worked with anybody that could work three hours a week. But if you could work three hours a week and put-up numbers, no one would care.
Bill: Yeah.
Josh: But a yeah, it's a different role. Banks are service industry and God help you if you're the legal associate on the other end of that deal, too, because then, you just get the water flow.
Liz: [laughs]
Bill: Yeah, that's a brutal-- I don't know. The lawyer lifestyle is very, very interesting, especially a big firm. How do you go in and try to talk to a big firm and say, "Look, you can still keep what makes you successful, but also adopt some of these principles that I think would be defined as more modern."
Josh: It's a good question. I think it's probably helpful to take a step back a little bit.
Bill: Yeah. I'll go anywhere you guys want. I just-- [crosstalk]
[laughter]
Josh: No, I love that. I guess, what I want to set the context is I think that the world is really changing. It's actually Larry Fink said this at the end in his annual letter, which was, "Nothing's been more profoundly changed a lot due to COVID, the relationship between employers and employees." I think that's clear. You're having the great resignation, you're having social unrest, all these different issues that are happening in society or in how we work are impacting, obviously, the employers in the labor market in a massive way. I think what's very clear too, is also you have millennials are going to be 70%, 75% of the workforce. You have a lot of different macro things at play, which are impacting work and COVID rapidly accelerated all those changes and we see that. No one's going to debate that.
What's interesting, though, is that, McKinsey did a really cool study in October and they asked employees, "What do you value in your employer?" And then, they asked employers, "What do you think your employees value?"
Bill: Hmm.
Josh: Obviously, compensation is critical. That's table stakes. But what was really interesting is that, there was a huge mismatch between what employers thought employees wanted what employees wanted. What employees wanted, simply put would be basically to feel seen, valued, and heard. Obviously, valued as compensation to some extent, but it's also having career growth, and learning opportunities, and valued-- The scene and you want to be connected to your peers, you want to be part of a culture, you want to be part of something bigger. Bigger, something that yourself, working as a team to execute. That's what companies don't necessarily have to focus on. I think that's a huge shift in how people are oriented to their jobs. If you think about, really that retention piece, which has become so critical, that comes down to recreating a workplace culture that's going to work in line with those values of what people actually want. I think there is a huge disconnect. I think people overweighted compensation, probably, to a huge degree. They overweighted perks. But it's not what actually keeps people out an organization.
We just attended this conference last week in New York City and as a culture conference run by a pretty large executive search firm, and what was fascinating to me until this was that was-- that was a huge amount on the buyside, you'd imagine private equity funds, big banks, and I'm like, "The diversity inclusion teams at those companies?" Roles and businesses, I never would have thought. If you went back 10 years, no way, that was. Even a conference I would have had was like 500 peoples packed. I think the big question from a company's perspective is, with remote and hybrid work here to stay, how do we rethink culture and what we do as a company? The answer is, yes, we're very intentional about those opportunities for people to connect, to learn from each other, and actually feel like they're part of something. So, the way we approach this with our partners is effectively we think in really two to three big buckets.
One is, what are the shared experiences of your people, what are the shared challenges of your people, and what are the shared goals that you have as an organization? That framework, you can almost think of it as interlocking kind of Venn diagram is going to collectively build culture and create outcomes. We can get into the whole ROI of retention and of culture and all these types of things, but long story short is that, it's wildly impactful. What we actually do around that is, our main product is something that we call Kunik Conversations. You can think of Kunik Conversations as intentional moments of connection learning and growth inside of a company. These conversations are facilitated by Kunik in partnership with subject matter experts. This is a sidetrack, but since I know the audience pretty well as being one of them, think of our expert as like a Gerson Lehrman group of culture consultants that can go in any org [unintelligible [00:19:28], but not transcripts.
Bill: Stream.
Josh: Stream, yeah.
Bill: Yeah.
Josh: Sorry. Are they a sponsor?
Bill: Yeah, they did sponsor me. I partner with them.
Josh: Yeah. We love that. [laughs]
Bill: I do some interviews for them, which is fun.
Josh: Well, great. So, then, Stream. But we align ourselves with subject matter experts, who are gurus in their field. This can be really anything where work, life, or family intersect. It could be around leadership, and empathy, and communication skills. It could be around diversity, equity, and inclusion. Or, it could also be about how to a good intersectional conversation about how do I talk to my kids about race? It could be, what am I missing, Liz? I'm trying to think of once we just-- [crosstalk]
Liz: Well, I think a lot of what we're seeing is also tied specific to industry now. I think what we're starting to see is that, to your point, companies don't have a choice anymore about listening to this or not, thanks to the wildly high amounts of turnover, I think, in large part, because people coming out of grad school and undergrad now, don't only have finance as an option. There's a lot of startups they can go to, there's a lot of techs they can go to to get paid. Pretty well and live a pretty good lifestyle. For companies to stay competitive, one side is yes, creating that culture. The second side that people always want is career development, growth, and pathways to greater learning and prosperity. That's where we're starting to see companies think about, "Okay, how do we continue to upskill these people in a way that is not logging in to another platform to another eLearning module, but where they're learning with peers and learning transferable workplace skills?" So, that's where we're seeing, for example, if you take associates at a finance company, maybe you're thinking about, "How do they ask better questions? When they're in a meeting, how can we think about using their 45 seconds in front of somebody higher up?"
To really ask that more provocative question or to really respond well to a question and not be caught flatfooted and to shine in that moment so, we were talking about law. We're seeing law firms think about that with associates, how can they upskill them when they're not partners yet, when they're not in that? I think we're seeing companies start to think up and down seniority levels in a way that they hadn't been before and I think a lot of that has been the changes to workplaces that have happened during COVID. But again, also just companies realizing that old ways are no longer cutting it for a new generation of employees.
Bill: If you could teach me how to not smirk at times, I would pay you a lot because that has gotten me in trouble.
Liz: Yeah, we can definitely work on that.
Bill: At home and at the office.
Liz: [laughs]
Bill: I have been in trouble.
Liz: Can help you with your kids. I smirk at my kids all too often, but at the office, we can help each other.
Bill: It's more of my wife and then, she's like, "What are you smirking at?"
Liz: [laughs]
Bill: I don't know. I just got some ADD medication. I'm doing less smirking and more paying attention.
Josh: [laughs]
Bill: So, maybe we'll see. I don't know.
Liz: God bless Big Pharma.
Bill: Yeah. I don't know. I'm paying them a lot. I got to get something else. Anyway, I digress.
Liz: [laughs]
Bill: It's funny, because I can hear some older people that I've talked to in the past be like, "This is just millennial garbage." I don't think it is, but I think that's the barrier to getting people that higher ups to accept that, like, work should be a little bit of a culture as opposed to just somewhere that you go grind it out. But back in the day, I think it was.
Josh: Yeah, it's got to shift. Here's the perversity. And speaking again to your crowd, I don't want to keep on railing on the buyside, or hedge funds, or anything like that. But anybody with a long-term orientation and from an investment perspective, culture should be a component of that process. Patagonia is not public, but if you could buy Patagonia, you probably would be really interested. Huge flywheel, a great culture they retain people, they create product. It's so intuitive and you get it. But why don't you bring it to your own company?
There's other cognitive dissonance there. But if you're building a company, you need a written tact to retain talent and you want to have the shared missions, and the vision to execute on your goals. That also creates a culture of innovation will be part of that, too, like, "Why is Apple, why are certain companies have been so successful?" It's because they have a culture that builds systems that enable them to create progress, and create alignment, and then, grow successfully. But you see companies fall off the rails when there's massive one, like, churn, obviously, is a huge issue. Take all these startups now, everybody's did SPACy kind of startups for now. Everybody's underwater on their option pool and people are so worried about people leaving. What happens then? Does your culture go toxic? Maybe, I don't know, but it should be a huge component and the data supports this wildly.
Liz: Listen, our parents are obviously at the older generation at the workplace if they're still working today. Most of us are familiar with that kind of perspective and that view and we also have worked for managers, who feel that way or had bosses that feel that way. I think that's something that's very real. I think we've never had four generations in one workplace before. We've got boomers, we've got Gen X, you've got millennials, you've got Gen Z. The thing is, primarily a lot of boomers, who feel that way and they're frankly outnumbered. It goes both ways. A, a question of yes, this is better for your bottom line, justice is better for competition. Yes, this is better for long-term thinking. It also just starts to become survival mode. If you want to keep good talent in your company and you want your company to grow, you have to face how to think about these things. And not coincidentally, a lot of the work we do when we go into companies like financial organizations and law firms is thinking about, "How are we dealing with legacy stakeholders? How are we getting people on board, who weren't on board in the beginning?"
Especially within even those upper echelons, you may have one or two champions and the vast majority may not agree with it, but might just go along with it. How do you shift those mindsets is a huge part of the work we do and I also think that at the end of the day, when they're looking at the data coming out whether or not they think it's BS, when they look at the data, Gen Z is even more advocating for this, more bought in than millennials. So, I think the trends are pretty clear, and how that keeps shifting across generations, and who makes up the bulk of the workforce today is well within millennial and Gen Z world.
Bill: Yeah, it's interesting. I think that there's a lot of companies, Costco is an example that traded a multiple that people would say, "Well, that's too high. It's overvalued." But it's like, yeah, but culturally it's not going to change. And therefore, you can depend on what the business is going to be given its value proposition and its culture. It deserves quite a premium to just some random company that looks like some cash flows on an Excel model. It's more bankable, I think.
Josh: Weren't you just saying that you wanted your kids to work at a Chick-fil-A franchise?
Bill: Yes.
Josh: Yeah. Why is that?
Bill: Because the franchisee that I was talking to who I hope will come on the program was just an incredible person and he was talking about how they execute, and how they how they run a drive thru, and how they get their consistency, and how they train people up, and I was like, "This is an incredible business to go learn from."
Josh: Right. And they've created a phenomenal management and customer experience, which is I would argue that's culture. One of my favorite investing books, which is an investing book is Danny Meyer, Setting the Table or Set the Table, whatever it's called. Have you read that, Bill?
Bill: No, I haven't.
Josh: Do you know who he is?
Bill: Yeah.
Josh: Yeah, it sounds great, but it's basically, you need to treat people really goddamn well and that's you create a warm atmosphere, you greet them, you look them in the eye, you make people feel welcome. It's the same thing from your employees. [crosstalk]
Bill: What was funny about Chick-fil-A thing is people were like, "The food's not even that good." It's like, "Yeah, but it's not even really about the food." The food is a product that people can rely on and the experience makes people happy. It doesn't have to be the best chicken sandwich in the world, they crush.
Liz: And that's what we're seeing across the board, right? Companies are, thanks to a lot of changes within the last few years. Companies and leaders are being asked to tie their values, their missions in an outward facing way to customers than they ever had before. It also goes to your point, you don't work at Chick-fil-A, but you know the culture, people know the culture. Josh mentioned Patagonia earlier. I don't work at Patagonia. I know that culture. More and more customers are also spending their dollars and choosing where to be clients, where to be customers based on what they see, here, and know about the way that that company acts in the world, the way that they take care of their people.
When you go back to that Patagonia model, what people think is, they take care of their people, they take care of their customers, they take care of their world, and I want to get behind it. That's why people think about it and know it. More and more, I think we're seeing senior leaders on everything from social justice movements to COVID, to return to work, to Ukraine, whatever the case may be, we've got a more global, more diversified, more spread-out workforce than ever before and that's forcing everything that happens in this world to impact employers. It used to be big multinationals, where the beasts, behemoths holding in the realm of the super large and they had very tailored to either in the office, their APAC office, their US office, even within that maybe an East Coast and West Coast. It wasn't that connected.
Now, you could have a 10-person startup that spread out all across the world. All of a sudden, that company has to think about how are we taking care of our people in all these different places. It goes from that 10-person startup up to the largest in the world. I think as we start having leaders have to think about how are we reacting, what are we reacting to A? B, how are we reacting to it? C, how are we communicating that to our people and then to our customers? That forces changes in culture, because otherwise, you've got Twitter, you've got LinkedIn, you've got email, you've got everything just spread it out there that, "Hey, my company's not taking care of me. They're not doing this." All of a sudden, your clients and customers know about it, too, and that's not a good look.
Bill: Yeah, it's interesting that you brought up multinationals. For some reason, all I could think about and it's probably because I had the negative experience is AB InBev, right? That's a company that I think had a real-- I think it's factual that Budweiser was a hell of a brand. I think that the way that they treated people and I think that if you talk to people in St. Louis, you heard it directly and I think it became evident that like, I think people started to root for Budweiser to fail a little bit and it opened a big door for-- Craft is a big part of this, but it certainly made them more fragile than I think they'd like to admit.
Liz: Absolutely. That kind of word of mouth gets out. Listen, not all of your employees are going to agree. You're seeing this now with companies, Citibank announced last week. Unrelated to this, but since we're talking about finance stuff, Citibank announced last week that they're going to pay for employees in Texas and other abortion restrictive states to go and get treatment elsewhere. That's going to polarize some people within a bank. But it's a perfect example of how companies are taking stands on different things that are related to politics, that are related to global events that comes back to how you treat your people, how you take care of your people, and what resources you're putting behind it. It sends an outward facing message to your clients, to your customers about how you're willing to really put dollars, energy, time, and resources behind your people and take care of them as humans and not just employees.
Bill: That's a cool stance by Citi Bank. I didn't realize that they had made that.
Liz: Unsurprising that it's the only female CEO on Wall Street, but--
Bill: Huh, huh, there you go.
Josh: I think it's so important to like, there's probably people listening and saying like, "There's this line between advocacy and taking care of your people."
Liz: Yep.
Josh: Kunik operates on taking care of your people and creating a culture, where people can feel like they're well respected and heard. Then, there's the element of advocacy, which I totally can appreciate from an internal perspective. If you're the manager, like, "What is our stance? Do we have to react to every social issue in the world?" The answer is, you have to figure that out yourself. It can be no. I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I think a lot of people complain about wokeism or some of these elements of culture is thinking about the advocacy perspective. That might be part of it, but you don't need to do that to still build a culture, where your people are diverse, and they feel supported, and they feel like, if you are a woman, and I'm going to get an abortion, we're going to take care of you, because that's your choice and you can be able to do it, but also, it doesn't need to become a political thing either. I think that's really important to pass on.
Liz: Absolutely.
Bill: Yeah, I didn't think that as a political advocacy. I view corporation and it should be by definition apolitical. If you live in Texas and are not prolife or need to get an abortion having a corporation facilitate that for you, to me, is the corporation fulfilling its duty. And then, if you're prolife, don't get one like whatever.
Liz: Precisely.
Bill: That would be my view.
Liz: [crosstalk] make their own choice. But it allows you to feel seen, valued, and heard by your employer, which then, ties you back to feeling you are part of something bigger and part of a mission to Josh's earlier point on McKinsey. I totally agree. It doesn't have to say, you do one or the other. Each individual can make their own political stances, their own political choices. But the point is enabling that person as an individual and as a human, because at the end of the day, that's what brings everybody together. People want to feel as human connections and I think what we saw, thanks to COVID is, when people got home, all of a sudden, they said, "Oh, I'm not connected." But really, I don't know that that many people felt so connected in their offices as they were. I think we had already started to see tension, started to see people not connecting, started to see a bit of that lack of humanity.
Really early into the pandemic, we worked with a tech firm in New York, and to Josh's point, one of the calls on family that turned out these two guys had worked in cubicles next to each other for three years. Had sons that were born a month apart with the same name and never knew that about each other. That's a pretty extreme example.
Bill: That's nuts.
Liz: Nuts. Absolutely crazy. That one's more extreme. We see this all the time when we open up the space to have these conversations is that, "Yeah, COVID forced that wide open in it, it put a spotlight on that, but there had been a real lack of connecting as humans." I think we started to see that, especially when you think about financial organizations and how people are usually compensated. As Josh said, we were at this conference for culture. We introduced the head of culture from Softgen, who is fascinating and they're really putting a big effort behind culture, really investing deeply.
But another company was up there and they were talking about how they're bringing everything back to teamwork, and they realized through this separation during COVID that they had been rewarding the behavior they didn't want, which is that they had been rewarding individual output versus team collaboration. They had been doing it for years at a driven individuals on how much can I personally put out? Not what are the strengths on our team? How is our team communicating? How can our team work together to produce a better product? They realized, they hadn't been enabling their managers to run that kind of work for their team, because they had been promoted based on their technical skills. Not on their leadership skills, not on their ability to foster that kind of connection amongst their team.
Through COVID, they ended up doing a whole reorg and thinking about how do we really foster that kind of collaboration, because ultimately, it produces a better product for our clients, which means we do better as a business overall. It's not done out of the goodness of their heart. It's done out of the bottom line and driving that revenue, but it also comes back to how are you creating the channels for that. We have the Larry Fink quote. "We have a big opportunity here as organizations to rethink pretty dramatically how work gets done, how people work together, and how we know each other and it requires a lot of trust, and that trust comes back to knowing each other as humans and individuals, and that's really what we try that."
Bill: That's interesting. This may sound corny, but I don't mean it in a corny way. I think some of what you're talking about is a little bit of what Zuckerberg is trying to accomplish with his version of the Metaverse. The getting to know and trust people, I think it's a big reason that Twitter Spaces has taken off, because you get to hear somebody, and you connect, and it's another level of engagement.
Josh: Yeah, 100%. This is a great segue into actually what we do and I don't mean as a plug, but it's the same idea. It's actually what you do in your podcast. I think you once described your podcast as overhearing a really interesting conversation at a bar, right?
Bill: Yeah.
Josh: That's what he said.
Bill: That's what I'd like to think it is.
Liz: [laughs]
Josh: I agree with that fullly. What we do is create these intentional conversations that are interactive and expert led. It will bring people together across divisions, or across teams, or it could be within a team, but it can be-- The Black employees at Google or the LGBTQ employees at Google, it can be the leadership at Google. Think about any kind of vertical or cohort, but we bring them together to have a conversation. Let's say, it's about creating psychological safety in your team. But it will be a conversation about all the different managers that are struggling with that, so, they can learn from each other about what they're doing, what's not working, brainstorm together, but it's also going to be facilitated by an expert, who has done that for a really long time. So, we're really privileged to work with this woman. She's amazing, she spent 20 plus years or 30 plus years, she was at a Big Bay area, she was at Autodesk, and she was the VP of engineering in the 90s as a woman, which is mind blowing that woman was running the team. She has an incredible depth of knowledge around what that means, and how to create it, and what it's also like to be a woman in a male-dominated industry. We lead those conversations with women inside companies a lot.
As much about getting people to hear from each other as it is from an expert and it's that two-way dialogue that leaves people with retract a few things, but one of them is, "Do I feel more connected to my colleagues and to my peers as a result of having this moment?" The answer is 98%, yes. The other thing is, "Am I leaving with something that's practical and actionable that I can then use?" Because I think a big problem with L&D or a lot of things is that, it can be a TED talk, which is this is interesting concepts, but I'm never going to use it in my day to day or it might only become relevant in a really long time from now. We also want to make that it's very tangible and extractable that you can literally do something with it the next day. All the data too, and this goes back to what we're seeing in the workplace is that, as a result of COVID, teams have grown incredibly small, incredibly small. So, if you're on the digital marketing division on one particular product, you're probably only talking to five people.
Bill: Yeah, because you don't bump into anybody in the office, right?
Josh: Right, exactly. But then, we also know that there's a lot of Zoom fatigue, we also know that everybody tried the Zoom happy hours. That stuff failed. No one's doing that anymore. What you have to do is create intentional-- We always consider it recess for the workplace. Why are we coming together, what's the purpose of us coming together, to also connect and share and learn from each other with purpose and with intention, and that is what we're doing for companies, and that in aggregate will drive over the course of programs with them that drives all these different ways. We focus on whole person support. How do we support, Bill, the manager, or Bill, the dad, Bill, the guy with ADHD, Bill, the guy that might be really feeling totally burned out. We would create multiple conversations.
Good examples. We're working with a large real estate company. They are the largest HOA in the nation. They have about 12,000 employees. They have a management team who had just older people in Texas, who are struggling with empathetic leadership in a remote hybrid setting. They have property managers, thousands of them across the country. Their job is basically sitting between boards and tenants. They are largely 50-year-old women, who are very diverse, who are also struggling, they're also caregivers. Oftentimes, sandwich generation. They have tons of pressure. They have no boundary between being on site or at home. They have employee resource groups. This diversity groups are basically not getting anything done, because the last one is that, everybody inside the organization is struggling with burnout, because everybody's just overwhelmed. So, Kunik comes in and we create four concurrent programs. One around empathetic leadership for that management team. De-escalation training for those property managers. How do I manage difficult conversations, how do I defuse tense situations, how do we create better boundaries for myself? Employee Resource Groups, we take a very human centered approach to a lot of the diversity inclusion work.
Let's have a conversation about what it means to have corporate code switching. What happens if I'm a light male and go into a white office like, "How am I changing who I am to be relevant?" Or, like, "Should I be doing that?" Let's have a conversation about talking about race with my family or a good example, too, is we had a company is a DC-based nonprofit, and we had an event with him on January 8th and January 6th happened, and we pivoted to have a conversation like, "What does this mean to my family, because of what just happened in the country?" Last like a series on burnout, but not typically from the self-care angle, but what are the systems and structures that we as a company can put in place to start mitigating this for our employees. We had thousand people on that first kickoff call and we got emails from employees saying, "I'm so grateful that my company is doing this for me. I was bawling in a Walgreens parking lot, because I wanted to listen to this and I feel so honored, and respected, and that they're appreciating how we feel right now." How do you measure that data? But that's really impactful. But the idea is that, the cumulative impact of that is you can imagine one person participate in all four of those different conversations, they're connecting with different people inside the organization, they're upleveling their skills, and they're also feeling supported as an individual, as a person, as a human.
Bill: Yeah, I think you measure it over the long term and retention. It seems to me that in a tight labor market, this is the way I would choose to compete if I were running a company. I'd be like, "Fine, we're going to make sure our employees really like it and they're going to tell their friends to come work here."
Josh: 100%. We have a hidden cost of culture calculator. What's the ROI in our people? Let's think about the average tenure for so many people. It's only two to three years. If you're in a tight labor market, let's say, you're in white-collar job, the cost to replace, Bill, is 200% of his annual salary between lost productivity-- [crosstalk] work for somebody.
Bill: Yeah. You got to work for somebody, then maybe, hire a bad person, and then you got-- [crosstalk]
Liz: On board then. All of it.
Josh: Yeah. You're like, "Hey, let's put in a program that's going to cost us x." We can keep bill three months longer like the programs pay for itself.
Bill: Maybe even a year.
Liz: Right. A year is great, but three months, you pay for the entire thing.
Bill: and Liz: Yeah.
Liz: I think the thing that we're seeing and we're hitting a residence is that's not new to employers. Sure, the labor market is tighter now, but the idea that replacing capital is expensive is not new. Companies know that. What is new is that they know that it is no longer being able to order seamless after 7 PM, being able to get a taxi home, all of the perks that you get when you work in a finance job in a big city or any company, but a lot of finance company listeners-- [crosstalk]
Bill: Not Facebook anymore. They said, No Moss.
Liz: Not Facebook. No more, no more. But you get a free app, you can have this, download and do your meditation app. All of that stuff isn't working. They haven't seen any measurable improvement and my opinion, our opinion at Kunik is that, that's because it doesn't tie you back to anything. You may download that app, maybe. You're probably getting a huge corporate benefit email from your employer, whoever said those things. Once a year, when you've got to choose your health plan for your family, for yourself, whatever it is, and that's about it. Beyond that, you're not like, "Hey, what is my company giving me today, by and large?" Really low use rates. It also just a one to one. It is you at one specific moment on an app. It does not make you feel more connected to Bill, more connected to Josh, more connected to your manager, more connected to the overall company.
I think that's where a lot of perkesk benefits haven't changed, they haven't driven tension. They're not moving the needle on how people talk about their company. It's not just retention. It's who you're bringing in the door. Are you bringing in your friends, are you saying this is an awesome workplace? You're not like, "Wow, this workplace is amazing, because I have 50% off to headspace." That's not shifting how people think about it, which isn't to say there isn't a place for that kind of benefit there is. But what we're really seeing is to Josh's point, the tears, the laughs, the smiles, people want to connect with other people, and they don't have that many ways to do it, and they're spending a lot of hours at work. To spend a lot of hours and feel like you don't know the people that you are not seen as an individual, that you are not connected to your team and your manager, it's huge loss as an employer. Because it's not overly complicated to fix it. It's just being intentional, deliberate, and creating the spaces and the opportunity for it.
Bill: Yeah. To my Facebook friends, I know you still have some benefits. I was exaggerating.
Liz: [laughs]
Bill: It's interesting like what I'm thinking about as you guys are telling me this or I should say, y'all, I'm sorry, Liz is-
Liz: Quite all right.
Bill: -it feels to me, you maximize the benefits of diversity through these conversations. Because you actually have conversations from people, from different backgrounds that can actually teach each other and that is beneficial, right?
Josh: Yeah.
Bill: Part of where I came from at BMO, I don't think this is controversial to say internally. If anyone's listening, that maybe it says something to remedy. I don't know. But a lot of the minority metrics were hit with the secretaries. How do you get the admins in conversation with the upper management to actually learn from each other? There are things that people can learn from each other. Something that I've been really, really upset about with what's going on with inflation is just like how it's going to hurt the people that are on the margin. The thing that I got to figure out some way to give back, but early childhood education or child care, even like one year old care, forget about education, just somewhere that a parent can go, trust their child to be that safe, to me, is massively impactful to the community. So, hopefully, conversations can, I don't know, uncover some of those issues and help companies say, "Hey, maybe we should provide this, because maybe, it's holding back the parents that work here that can't think, because they're so worried about what's going on to their kid this day or whatever."
Josh: Yeah. Big picture, I think, what's been lost in society and social media plays a big role is like we're all living in echo chambers. You are finding your tribes and you're really committed to working with them, but you're dismissive of other views. The issue with that is that, I would go back to your bar analogy, if you're sitting at the bar and you have an opportunity to have a conversation with somebody who doesn't look like you're from a different walk of life, you have that beer, you have that coffee, odds are you're going to find they have a lot more in common than you do apart. That's the big issue. I think what we're doing in many ways to just enabling people to have conversations about the big things that matter to them in a psychologically safe way in a place that's protected from that--
We've never had the hundreds of conversations that we have with our partners, like, anything go off the rails, where it's like a fight or anything like that, because it's all focused on the human centered. It's like, "We want to do better for our families, we want to do better for ourselves, we want to do better for the business" and that's the approach.
Liz: I want to go back to your point about diversity, because a big thing that we're seeing and to be very clear, we don't consider ourselves a diversity inclusion shop. That isn't really what we do. But it gets out what you were saying something which is that I think a lot of what's out there and especially, in certain industries has been really focused on more of a check the box approach.
Bill: Yeah.
Liz: Do we have this check, do we have this many people, they fall into this category check? It hasn't been about how do we integrate people, how do we--? That's when you think about diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, whatever acronym you're using at your company, that diversity part is really just in the door and that's where the check the box comes in. That part about inclusion and belonging is really different, a little bit harder to get at, but arguably, more important in the long term, because that's what drives that innovation that Josh is talking about, that's what drives people staying there and I think that goes to the podcast that we all read before this. Josh, I'm forgetting his name.
Josh: Oh, Invest Like the Best, the one with Gaurav.
Liz: Yeah.
Josh: Yeah.
Liz: Yeah. And he was talking a bit about this, too. We were starting to see flickers and people talking about this on Wall Street, which is that, check the box isn't working. Traditional DEI education really, "You need to learn this lesson, learn this lesson, learn this lesson." That does not bring people together to Josh's point. That does not create that sense of inclusion. If instead you just talk about, "Hey, this is my experience, this is my reality, this is what I'm bringing to the table" and maybe it is. As a single mom, really, because childcare is very broken in this country. Maybe it is. I don't know where to put my kid, I don't have that option or the childcare that I had before COVID is now shut down, and you want us back in an office, and I have nothing within a 45 minute drive that has extended hours, and you're telling me we need to be back here until 5 PM, and my childcare has now mandated that it has to be at 4:30, and so, I'm going to have to leave the office at 3:30, whereas instead, if I worked from home those days, maybe I'd get extra hours. Whatever the case may be, it's specific to each person.
The point is, everybody's got something on their mind when they come into the workplace every day. It's way less about drilling down, you have to learn this or you're wrong because of this, and way more about, how do we make sure that it is a culture, where somebody in that position does feel comfortable saying, "Hey, this is the reality that I'm dealing with and it's clouding up a lot of my mental space, and it's also started creating an issue for me, because it's cutting into my hours or whatever it is." I think most employers haven't focused on creating that kind of culture, where somebody can step forward and say that, unless they are already at the top, but they usually have different concerns on their mind.
Bill: What's the biggest barrier that you have to opening the doors to talk to people? Because it seems to me that what you're saying makes perfect sense, but it also seems to me that you're fighting against a fair amount of inertia.
Josh: It's a good-- I think the funny thing is, when we talk to somebody, who gets it, they'll just say like, "I'm in, I'm sold, I want to do this." Other people take a little bit more cajoling-- Listen, this goes into-- I don't know if we have the right answer at this point to tell you. I think either people are slowly making the transition to realizing it. I think it also depends on the culture. The culture of the company can be and this is a totally legitimate culture, by the way is like, eat what you kill, every man for himself, compensations-- That's how you want to operate. That's fine. I think that also wouldn't be a good fit for us, because life isn't like, "I don't want to work with assholes either. We're not going to be able to support them."
I think you have a big approach, you talk about how yourself will get value if you create values for others. Create value for-- the pie is not finite, it's infinite. And so, how do we grow it together? It's the same approach with those companies that we also want to work with. People that have that orientation are committed to making that, I think will also realize the benefits. The culture in many ways is intangible, but there are elements that you can measure. You have to find people, who are committed to making that, who wanted to invest for the long term to better their products, to better their services, to better their people and know that payoff might not be in three months or next quarter, but we'll be better positioned longer. It's that owner's mindset.
Liz: I think it's also that people don't necessarily know where this sits and so, it's kind of-- Well, this impacts everybody in our company. Sometimes, some of our clients, it's been a bit of pass-the-hat approach. A little bit comes out of a DEI budget, a little bit comes out of an L&D budget, a little bit comes out of an HR budget. But I think by and large, two things. One, it just isn't something that companies have had to focus on before. Yeah, there's been people leading the pack, who are exceptional and have great culture, and we're way ahead of the curve. But the majority of companies out there haven't really had to dig in and focus on this. I think that's why if you look up culture head or head of culture, head of people in culture, chief culture officer on LinkedIn, there's not that many. I know, because I've cold emailed most of them.
[laughter]
Liz: There's not that many out there. You're just starting to see this, be something that companies are really investing in a long-term owner's mindset to Josh's point. And I also think culture is a funky one, where sometimes people will have a reaction of, "Oh, should we be doing this all internally?" And the answer is, if you can, great. Most companies can't and there is a certain level of comfort that employees feel when something isn't hosted by HR. There is still a bad rep around HR, there is still, I don't know if this is going into my performance review. I don't know, where this is getting reported when it's hosted internally by a company. We also work with some companies that have nominal cultures and still bring us in, because they want that comfort of the third party, so that people feel they can really open up, really share, really dig in. But I do think companies are just now starting to get comfortable with culture might be something where we need some outside support.
Bill: You might need to have a circle of trust.
Liz: [giggles] Exactly.
Bill: This is a safe space. You could say something.
Liz: Great. You are outside the circle of trust.
Bill: Yeah, that's right.
Josh: [laughs]
Bill: What's the smallest client you work with?
Josh: We have companies we're about as close knock-on wood with-- They're a small nonprofit, they are about 80 people. Our largest partner is T-Mobile. They are 90, 90-ish. 85,000, 90,000 people. Speaking of culture, we work with our employee experience team. A lot of listeners here will know T-Mobile, super well. That is a phenomenal culture. They believe magenta, they put the resources around it, because they get it, they have the ROI. Interestingly enough, too, everything starts with the frontline there. If there're no benefits that go to corporate really that don't go to people in the store or out in the field, the field gets it, the stores get it, they get time off to participate in the kind of conversations that we host for them. They do a lottery system. They view it as part of the growth of their employees, and part of their retention strategy, and the cultural strategy that it's really phenomenal. So, the cool thing of what we do is it can scale up or scale down very easily.
Bill: I like that. You just see it in the results with T-Mobile, like, just open up the financials, compare them to the competitors, and it's not too hard to see the trend over time.
Josh: Correct.
Liz: The leadership is really bought in. To your point or Bill about, there's people you've talked with that you can see them be like, "Ah, I don't know." Listen, their leadership team is super bought in publicly, openly, aggressively bought into building that magenta culture. And it does to Josh's point, you see it from the bottom, you see it from brand new employees, entry level employees, all the way up to the top C suite. And that creates something pretty unique that does outperform, not surprisingly.
Bill: Yeah, that's cool. What's been the hardest thing about being a founder for the two of you?
Josh: [chuckles]
Liz: Naming was not a pretty thing.
Josh: [laughs]
Liz: Josh and I, we met in business school, we really bonded on a ski trip, because we're both pretty mediocre skiers, who are much more into our Prey Ski than we were into skiing, which is really what brought us together. But listen, when you start a company with somebody it is, I'm married with kids, but this is a second marriage. You spend a lot of time together, talking, doing everything. I think the hardest part for me is, I have two so far, hopefully, more, but I had both my kids during this. When you're building a company, I took zero days of maternity leave. I was emailing from the hospital bed both times. So, that was not awesome experience, but we got through it.
Bill: Yeah, well, I would define that as not awesome.
Liz: [laughs]
Josh: I think everyone will say this, but it's a roller coaster. I think I had posted about this. I don't have any followers and I don't know. But the idea is that, I think a lot of us measure ourselves on big achievements. I don't know. You did x or you got x bonus, or these big demarcation points in your career. In aggregate, really you only going to have a handful of them. But what we forget is the little stuff in between, the daily progress. I think as a founder, you can get really tied up in the day-to-day swings and you have to be really good about managing your emotions, which is not very different than being an investor like, "How do I stay the course do what I do," is really important to also take a step back at times and say, "Holy shit, what I've done when I'm creating is really great."
Listen, I've taken a very different approach to building a company, which goes back into the idea to have like, we've fully bootstrapped those companies. I haven't taken a paycheck, which is really hard. But on the other hand, I think we're building something that's really impressive. The day-to-day fluctuations of not getting the deal closer, sometimes, you're like, "This is the dumbest thing I've ever done. Why am I doing this? I could go work from somebody else to do really well." But then, take a step back and say, "Wait a minute, I'm actually building something that's impacting people's lives." I think you can do well and do good and I think that's where we're going. So, that was a long-winded answer but I think it's not getting caught up in the day-to-day fluctuations of your emotions and just staying the course. That's hard.
Bill: Yeah, I would imagine.
Josh: [laughs]
Bill: I imagined the first client was just like Cloud Nine type stuff and then, I don't know.
Josh: Yeah.
Bill: And you're doing it for each other, right? You got a partner that you care about. So, it's cool.
Josh: Yeah. Our first partner was Trupanion-
Bill: Oh, yeah?
Josh: -which was super cool. Yeah.
Liz: I think I sent you a Kunik fleece that day when we closed it out first.
Josh: [laughs]
Liz: Our first and only swag and-- [crosstalk]
Josh: Yeah. [laughs]
Bill: I'm actually looking at pet insurance right now. So, we'll see.
Liz: We have a lot of thoughts. We'll take offline about pet insurance, because we both have dogs and we have separate pet insurance, Josh and I. Different companies. Happy to share with you.
Bill: Yeah, well, I do need your help on that.
Liz: Yeah.
Bill: I was talking to somebody about this puppy and they told me like, "She likes socks" and they were like, "Yeah, she's going to swallow a sock." and you have to pay 1400 bucks. You need pet insurance. And then, I realized like, "Oh, okay."
Liz: I just went to the vet. They said, "She's got to get a root canal," you know? That's wild.
Bill: So, how old are you two kids?
Liz: Two and a half and one.
Bill: And you have a dog?
Liz: Mm-hmm.
Bill: How old is that dog?
Liz: Four.
Bill: All right. Well, at least it's not a puppy [crosstalk]
Liz: Yeah. Thank God.
Bill: And you want to have another child?
Liz: She's energetic, though. We do. Yeah.
Bill: Soon?
Liz: Which Josh is very intimately involved.
Bill: [laughs] [crosstalk] I hope not too intimately involved.
Josh: No. [crosstalk]
Liz: No, I meant he knows all the plan. I'm not bursting the plan. Good Lord. No, I'm just reversing plan bubble. I'm having another kid. I just wanted to make that clear. Oh, my God.
Bill: You're the one who said it. Not me.
Josh: [laughs]
Liz: I know. It’s true, it's true. I just meant this isn't my co-founder finding out for the first time on a podcast. So, we want another kid because that'd be, yeah, a lot to share.
Bill: That's what we do on The Brew. Well, it's [crosstalk] The Business Brew. I just had a trademark dispute that I got to work through.
Liz: Oh, see, that's why naming is tough.
Bill: Yeah. I was like, "How is this even happening?" Some random person, then, I got to pay lawyers and stuff. It's ridiculous.
Josh: Yeah, oh, wow.
Liz: It's wild.
Bill: Yeah. Well, this is what you find out, right? Super fun.
Liz: You learn by doing.
Bill: Yeah, no doubt. Well, I would advise you, even though, you didn't ask to have the child quicker than not, because--
Liz: Oh, no, we're trying.
Bill: All right. Well, I'm rooting for you.
Liz: You, three or four?
Bill: Yeah, no, three.
Liz: Okay. What's the span?
Bill: 98% sure, they're eight, six and four.
Josh: [laughs]
Liz: 98% is all you need. That is great.
Bill: I think I have that right. When we had the third, we were just like, "We got to do this now. Otherwise, it's never going to happen."
Liz: Oh, yeah. No, we're in the same boat. We got to keep it quick or else we're going to lose the momentum.
Bill: Yeah, I'm glad we had the third. I wasn't so sure on the first. My wife was eight months pregnant looked at me and she's like, "Is this a mistake?" I looked at her and said, "Maybe," which is not the right response.
Josh: [laughs]
Liz: That's so not right. My husband was not far off from you. He thought that I was like, I don't know wrong, about being pregnant. We went in for the first ultrasound. The first one, the heartbeat comes on the speaker and he faints in the doctor's office, it was like [unintelligible [01:03:04] Broadcom.
Bill: There you go.
Liz: He was like, "I didn't think it was true until we were in here." So, he was with you a little reluctant on the first.
Bill: To be fair, I was wrong. I love my first enough to have two more. But at the time, I had no idea.
Liz: Exactly.
Bill: We had a great life and no kids and she was like, "Because this is a mistake."
Liz: And no dog.
Bill: It could be. Yeah. All right, well, we can get back to talking about y'all. So, what else should we talk about? I want to hang with you, guys. I like talking to you.
Liz: [laughs]
Josh: Did you want to talk about the Invest Like the Best-
Bill: Yeah, sure.
Josh: -Podcast, you mentioned that. One thing is that I didn't know him. I don't know him. But look, he was one year ahead of me at Penn. I was like, "Man, this guy. I don't know. He's done something really right about the same duration of our career that I have not yet to figure out."
Liz: We are on the way, Josh.
Josh: We are on the way. That's what Liz told me today. One, I thought it was super cool that he's thinking this way and building a team that is super focused on that thought leadership around diversity and voices of opinion inside the firm, and building for the long term. It just made so much sense. I don't understand why you don't think about it. It's actually interesting, too. I don't know if you've ever read Southeastern letters.
Bill: Sometimes.
Josh: Yeah. I read the 3Q, I guess, in the fall and I don't know if it's the first time they put it in there. But we're actively thinking about DNI and diversity of our team. I was like, "Wow, this is so cool." Now, this is starting to catch on. I thought what was really interesting, too, though, and there was a HBS study that just got published this week and I sent you the screenshot, Bill, but I don’t remember it. It was basically looked at and that's idea of diversity, psychological safety, and team performance. The more diverse your team is, it doesn't necessarily translate to team performance, which some people hadn't talked about before. But it's the element of psychological safety, too. So, if you have the combination of diversity of thought or people, plus the space and culture, where there's a psychologically safe environment, then, you're up until the right. That's where-- [crosstalk]
Bill: Yeah. This is what I'm saying about you guys facilitating this kind of conversation, right?
Josh: Correct.
Bill: All of a sudden, everybody can get in a room and have a talk, and especially, if you can figure out how to do it and have it be something that people are looking forward to. That's got to be so powerful.
Josh: Yeah, listen, this has been done for a long time, too. Historically, the practice offered my brothers and YPO. YPO has done this in a really great way, where it's across companies, but it's always leaders and managers coming together to be very vulnerable about their challenges, maybe, at the business and leaving their teams. But coming together from a cohort perspective, with facilitators who are excellent at whatever that topic might be, people love YPO. My brother, a lot of people claim that some of the best thing that they've ever done is like, "Why can't companies do similar thing internally?" I think that's idea.
He mentioned doing offsites, where they think they're doing a lot of that work and I think that's really critical. Obviously, different doing that at a 50-person company, where maybe they can manage it themselves versus really large companies. But a mentor of ours, he was head of HR and Capital Group and Capital Groups, probably, the only financial firms that I know of the historically has been doing this at scale for a really, really long time. People don't leave Capital. They treat you incredibly well, they invest heavily in their people, you're obviously paid incredibly well, whenever they wanted a half trillion dollars of AUM or whatever it is. But people stay, because they build a culture and they have that thing. You need to figure out a way to build it. This is evidence backed, this is real stuff. But it's tricky to manage and do.
Bill: Yeah, I know the guys at WCM are thinking about some cool things. When I was talking to them about it, I was like, that is-- It's not we talk often, but when they told me about it, I was like, "This is really forward thinking" and I think it could-- I'm excited for them, because I think if they do it the right way, it could be really, really cool and I think they're thinking about it the right way.
Josh: When they're building a business for the long term, right?
Bill: Yeah.
Josh: They are not just focused on maximum rent extraction for the short term, right?
Bill: Yeah.
Josh: I think they're probably thinking about how do we create WCM and to be in the next Capital Group or something like that. That's going to be around for a long period of time. Maybe, they don't want to be that big, but how do we build a sustainable durable franchise and business, that's really critical. But I think a lot of people in the hedge fund space are more optimized towards getting paid as much as possible in a short window of time and moving on with their life, which is fine, which is totally different.
Bill: Yeah, I think that's probably true. I don't know about most people in the hedge fund space. But I know that if I was building my own firm, I would be more aligned with trying to figure out-- I just think talent stuff to keep and it's the-- I've heard my dad's generation or whatever, has always told me like, "Employees just don't care about the company is like they used to." And my retort was always like, "It doesn't seem to me that companies care about employees like they used to either."
Josh: Yeah.
Bill: This is maybe a way to change that.
Josh: Yeah, I think so. I think if a company can show to their employees that they care about them and then, they're staying with them, it's very different. Then people will stick with you, but it has to be a two-way street. Historically, I think what we're helping a pithy way to think about as we're helping companies go from talking at or to their employees to talking with them. It's a subtle shift, but it's really important.
Bill: How do you do this without people being like, "Oh, here's another training?"
Josh: Because it's-- [crosstalk]
Liz: Not training.
Josh: [laughs]
Bill: Yeah, you know what I mean? How is it something that people look forward to? I know that you said the end result is that that people really enjoy it. But when you're thinking of the program and whatnot, how did you say to yourselves, how can we do something that people are excited about doing and participating in rather than another module or whatever?
Liz: Completely. Listen, we both have been in that seat and thought about, "God, I see that on my calendar and I don't want to go." So, that was a big part of thinking about to your point and how we designed it. There's a couple of things that we've found have worked really well for that. Part of it is this subject, really nailing things that matter to people. That's a lot of social listening. That's paying attention to what's being written in the paper on Twitter, on LinkedIn, all over the place. What are people talking about, what are they complaining about, what are they stressed about, and then, focusing on those topics. It's not just typical 101 type lesson or training to your point. It's thinking way beyond that in terms of, this is something that somebody is going to read specifically the title of this event and say, "Oh, that's me. I want to go hear that." That's one is thinking really in depth about the content.
Two is we always try and drive engagement. It's never death by PowerPoint, we don't use webinar modes. It really is about getting people across different departments, different groups, different seniority levels into one space and hearing from each other. And actually, humans like to gossip. They want to hear what other people are saying. They want to know what feels sharing in that conversation that otherwise they may have missed out on. There is a certain level of FOMO, or I want to hear, or that that comes in. Then, the other thing that we do a lot of is bringing in different leadership for things like fireside chat, the roundtables, and not the leader who is always on podcast, always being interviewed, who you've heard from a million times. But maybe somebody at a senior level, who nobody really knows about, who doesn't share that often, who's never in the press or in the media. We often will start within the first three months of programming, doing a fireside or roundtable with one to two of those people. Because that draws people into just that pure human nature of, "Oh, geez, I want to hear what's personal to them, what's normal with them," and we'll bring them in for a very more intimate conversation.
What we've also seen, frankly, as people come once and maybe it's somewhat depending on the company, maybe it's somewhat mandatory, not mandatory, but highly encouraged, highly recommended. Ideally, we're doing our job well enough. So far, we have been knock-on wood. The people talk about it and we've seen a lot of that. There's a step every time we have one, we have more people come to it when they're open. If it's a cohort, of course, that's a little different. But by and large, people are talking about it. There's a bit of a word of mouth that goes along with that, too. Josh, I don't know what I'm missing on that.
Josh: Yeah, the big thing is that we're only as good as the experts that we bring in from outside to work with our partners.
Liz: Yeah.
Josh: It's not, Liz and I leading these sessions. So, I spent a ton of my time vetting diligence in and speaking to experts. What makes us different about that, it's not just inhouse trainers, there's no Kunik five steps solution to get your workforce on track. We're just putting the same module together repeating, which, by the way, is super boring and that's what most people get. We find a lot of people-- Yeah, it's true. We find a mix of people, who might be professional coaches, but also that are real life business men or women working in seats. It's much more relatable. We have an amazing guy, who he runs a pretty large company and then, the financial crisis happened and he had the choice of basically either firing 50% of his employees or closing his office, and keeping everybody, but just going to distribute a team, which was really early to do that. He did that. He's learned a ton about running and managing a digital, like, a distributed team.
Bill: Wow. Hang on. So, he chose to shut his office down and keep his employees rather than keep his employees--
Liz: [unintelligible [01:13:17]
Bill: Wow.
Josh: [unintelligible [01:13:18] Yeah. What's really interesting about him and this is really cool. He has a whole framework around meeting. Let's take a systemic approach to burnout. Burnout is a key role to impact of pressure over time. But what causes pressure is, endless Zoom meetings, you don't need to be involved with. People are dying by Zoom meetings right now. It's like, people are over meeting. That's the one of the biggest complaints you can hear about. He has a whole framework about a mental model, different types of meetings, who gets called into when. But it's a structural approach, actually how to manage a distributed team. That matters. But people don't know this. We often use the analogy that people are treading water currently as it goes to promoting hybrid management. But there are practices, where you can start moving from that to operate in the AP level. That has to be intentional. There're deliberate ways to do it. Well, people don't like that. People are going to pay attention to Chris, when he speaks.
Liz: And Chris' title is not another effing meeting. So, people say, "Okay."
[laughter]
Liz: This isn't another eLearning module that I had to log into and watch them out. Not another effing meeting. Yeah, I feel that. I don't want another effing meeting. I'm going to go to this one. It's that combination, the title, the content, the expert, they bring it into a place, where people say, "Okay, cool. I'm going to join."
Bill: Can you tease his framework at all? What's his framework?
Josh: Yeah, there are a few different ones, but the ideas around like, "Who needs to be in what kind of meeting when?" When you're doing all hands, when are you doing smaller ones, how are you making use of notetaking in Zooms and creating asynchronous content that people, who are not there to be on the periphery can still get access to. It comes into a lot of these systems and structures around communication, sharing information across teams in a distributed manner. It's the short way to think about it. But that is really critical and duration, too.
Liz: Duration, yeah.
Bill: I think you should meet Troy from Stream. He's a really interesting systems thinker. I did a podcast with him and now, seeing how they operate, the way that he's got the email there, and who cc'ed and who jumps in when, I was like, "Man, this is an efficient machine." It's so easy to tell that it was thought about on the frontend and that's why the backend runs smoothly. I'm 98% sure they're very distributed. So, it'd probably be a decent connection for you.
Josh: Totally. That's a perfect person we would love-- We have the privilege of working with this gentleman named Darren Murph, who's head of Remote at GitLab. They just went public, they've been fully distributed forever, and he's just this knowledge guru of all things, asynchronous, and communication wise. We bring him in to work with our partners, too. We're bringing in thought leaders in the space of work and life to bring these conversations together. We're working with a very large media company, who I won't name his-- This is a way on like the social aspect. They're like, "We're really struggling with our relationship between our community, with our entertainers around politics. around all the social issues that are going on in the world."
Liz: It's not Spotify, just to be clear.
Josh: It's not Spotify.
Bill: [laughs]
Liz: [laughs]
Bill: It could be.
Josh: This professor literally wrote the book about diversity in media. What does that mean? But we'll make it fun. We'll show clips from a movie or from a song and lead a discussion around it. It's fun. That's what I say, it's recess for work. I'm a geek. I can go to school all the time and take all these fun, interesting courses and like, "Why can't you create that same, similar atmosphere of that idea of learning connection and growth inside of a company where it's not by pulling teeth?"
Bill: Media would be interesting, because Hollywood is, they peacock a lot with our politics. I would think that it creates issues internally, because if you have a truly diverse organization by definition, it shouldn't be any more than 60:40 one way politically. So, I would think that an industry that is constantly putting itself in the spotlight politically would create some really unique situations.
Josh: Yeah.
Bill: I don’t know.
Josh: Yeah. All those big tech companies have product inclusion people, who are really focused on this in a very deep way with a fascinating conversation.
Bill: I guess to facilitate a conversation, especially around politics has got to be so difficult. But if you can do it, and you can allow people to feel heard, and actually keep things respectful, I think that'd be pretty cool, but that would be tough. I know you're not doing around politics. I'm just saying.
Josh: Yeah, exactly. We're not-- [crosstalk]
Liz: Not around politics. But we've done stuff like interfaith, for example, which faith is one that can get dicey in the workplace and not everybody always wants to talk about or always wants to broach. We've done with certain companies work on diversity that I think to an earlier point, not everybody in the company feels the same way. Some very on the woke side, some are very odd on the more traditional conservative side, and a lot are in the middle. Whether or not, it's politics or faith or something around diversity, there are conversations that drive a bit of conflict, drive a bit of different opinions, and that's a huge aspect of what we do in the vetting of the experts is, "Can they navigate this, can they facilitate it?" And that's also why for companies, the employer is bringing in Kunik as a resource to host this conversation. It's really different if the employer is saying, "I want you guys to talk about faith in the workplace" as opposed to think, "We are opening up this space to talk about faith in the workplace with a third party, core experts on how to have these conversations."
It enables an employer to go into places and tackle subjects that otherwise might be hard for them to do on their own. That's also why on every single conversation we have, no Josh and I are not facilitating it, but somebody from our team is on there with the expert. Our team personally is trained on how to navigate those conversations. They're then in there with the experts to make sure that these do run. But to your point, if people can open up and talk about it, it removes friction, it removes tension, it creates more understanding and bonds that lead to more trust. But a lot of people just don't know how to open that up and have that conversation. So, we absolutely help with topics like that. Not exclusively, but it is a place we go.
Bill: Yeah, I think it's cool too. It relieves some pressure from the employee to have you be the third party to facilitate the conversation rather than the employer saying like, "Hey, you're all going to do this." Because then, I would think people feel they're almost being graded on participation or something-
Liz: Totally.
Bill: -whereas, if you're just impartial third party, defenses get reduced.
Josh: And importantly, too, we don't collect any of the personal information. It's not going to HR-- [crosstalk]
Bill: You don't have the Ray Dalio system, where people are reading about each other saying and feeling. [laughs]
Josh: No, no. That's really critical. It's funny. We've gotten really like back to basics in many ways, where everybody else is moving to more data, more athlete. We track certain parts of data, but we think it's really important to just create, like, take the cigarette break, take the kombucha bar, whatever it was based on people having conversations with each other. And that can't be replicated any other way that I know.
Liz: You can't put an app for that.
Josh: Yeah, you can't. There're no apps going to create that. There are people creating like, "We'll message you on Slack. Have you met Bill? You should meet him up for a coffee." That's not really as effective, I think as getting people in the room having a conversation about these things. I think that the idea too, is to help companies move from having reactive stances to many things to having no active positions and what their people are being able to facilitate it. That's one of the most proud moments was like, we worked with the Bay Area Tech company and then, in April of last year, there was all that anti-Asian hatred going on. Then, a decent sized-Asian populations are based in the Bay and we facilitated the conversation for the Asian community to come forward and everybody else in the firm attended but as listeners. So, let's hear from Bob and who you never talked to before, but he's crying because he's like, "Yeah, my father is in a different city and he went to a supermarket and was cursed out, or pushed, or something like--"
People are crying and cheering, but creates a whole different sense of vulnerability and understanding, who the people are that you work with. Contextualize is a lot of what people are experiencing what you might read about in a really human way. That's not everything that we do, but to be able to do that for your people, I don't know, you got to believe that everybody in that room or virtual room left feeling, changed in a really important way.
Bill: Yeah, I referenced my old employer before, but the bank that it was before BMO was Harris, and I do think that what they did do was they did a very good job at having conversations like this and highlighting like, these conversations are going on. And the tenure of a lot of the bankers is incredible. Part of its that, it's a nice life to be a banker there. But part of it, too, is it really was a nice community to be a part of. There's a lot of good people there, and they're working towards a common goal, and trying to help middle market borrowers, and stuff was, I think it's a noble pursuit. And then, around that, I think that the employer did a good job at creating a community and trying their best to foster conversation. So, I have seen it a little bit up close and personal and it's hard to argue that the retention numbers didn't speak well, as a result, and I think that they probably get a little bit of benefit, because they may not pay market.
Josh: Yeah.
Bill: But it doesn't matter, because people stay.
Josh: [chuckles]
Liz: Right and they have community. It's huge.
Bill: Yeah.
Josh: But it also can be self-serving. One of the most common conversations that we host in series that we'll do is around stress and burnout. But there's a clear performance angle to that, too. How do I get my people to be less stressed, and be more productive, and benefits everybody? That's one that we'll do. We do a lot and it's a really cool approach. That'd be a cool one, maybe even to do for-- If you ever want to do it, we could bring one of our experts on and do spaces on it or something like that. Because she has a really cool mental model, that's really applicable that can help people start understanding what you're experiencing, why you're experiencing, and actually how to deal with it. That is a clear like [laughs] it is self-serving. I want my people to increase productivity and here's how we do it, but it's also something that's better for everybody inside the organization, too.
Bill: Liz, you look like you have something to say.
Liz: No, I'm just going to say, I think the line between self-serving and building that, it's the same as making a manager better, right?
Bill: Right.
Liz: If you build a better manager and you do a lot of-- we do a ton of work with managers, because especially, right now, new managers are often being promoted not in their traditional workplace, maybe not for the skills, you mentioned Darren Murph earlier, Josh. We bring him in and he talks a lot about when everybody was sitting next to each other in a cubicle, managers could really just direct your work. They could physically look at your computer screen and say, "That's not right, Bill, that's not right, Bill, that's not right, Bill." Their technical skills were able to compensate for any other gap, because they could literally direct your work, decide when you were in a meeting or not, bring you in, see when you were talking or not, all of that. You can do that in a hybrid world. You definitely can't do it in a remote world.
Darren talks a lot about, "Okay, how do I unblock for Bill? I can't physically direct his work anymore. I need a different set of skills," which allows Bill to come to me the minute he gets stuck and say, "Darren, I don't know how to do this. I don't know who to contact, I don't know where to get help or whatever it is." Going to your manager and saying that requires a massive amount of organizational trust to go. They help, put your hand up, "I don't know where to go." Most teams weren't built on that sense of unblocking and then, the remote and hybrid world, a manager's job is really to unblock and allow those-- the rest of your team to just run forward. I produce as quickly as they can collaborate as much as they can and drive better results. But if you're using an old model of sitting next to each other and correcting their work together, you're going to fall flat on your face. So, yes, that is self-serving in the sense that you're building better teams, and building better managers, and building frankly better individual contributors along the way, but it also, to the benefit of creating that kind of trust and human connection within a firm. So, I think the two intersect a lot.
Bill: I was in an awful mood yesterday. I was down, and I wasn't seeing positivity, and I started to think about it, and I was like, "I guess, part of me thought that we would get through COVID and then, I wouldn't have to worry about the next horrible headlines in the world." And now, it's like, just when COVID feels it's over which God knows it may not be, all of a sudden, commodities are flying, because of war in Russia, and you've seen schools getting bombed. It's just like, "What the hell is going on?" That's outside of work, right? And then, inside of work to your points on people have been remote and I think that that puts a lot more-- Well, I think it has the potential to put more stress on the individual. I would think burnout is something that would be a major, major topic right now.
Liz: Oh, my God, it's rampant. Yeah. It is by far as Josh said, the biggest conversation we do and we do it often multiple times, multiple approaches across different levels within the organization. Burnout for teams, how are managers recognizing and commenting burnout for their individuals, how are managers avoiding burnout out there? You have to attack it from multiple different perspectives, because there is no silver bullet from burnout, but there are a lot of very practical steps you can take and address as an individual, as a leader, and as a teammate, and as an organization on how you're changing from everything to how your managers run a team, to meetings, to Josh's point to how you think about and contextualize it. I think there's a lot of focus on self-care when it comes to burnout. But we cannot yoga our way out of the burnout that is happening across this country and these organizations right now.
Bill: It would be nice.
Josh: Yeah.
Liz: It would be great.
Bill: [laughs]
Liz: It's not going to happen.
Josh: Your Peloton helps. Yeah, related to that a really common theme, too, that we work a lot too that's related to this is you're talking about, she's pretty amazing. But it's like happiness and dark times and cultivating inner resilience.
Bill: Yeah.
Josh: That's a huge topic that companies should think about, also. That's something we work a lot, whether it could be resilience from being a woman working in a male-dominated industry and dealing with all those really complexity, or microaggressions, or kind of discrimination that you have to face every single day, and having the space around that, let's bring the women together, have a conversation about that. But it's also just in general, so like, what are the experts that we work with there? She started her career as basically being a social worker working with families, whose kids were in cancer wards and dealing with-- But what you notice, what set her off in her career was that, some families would thrive and some would sink. The question was, "Why did some thrive and why did some sink?" Not thrive, but manage better and come closer and leave. They were dealing with one of the, I can't really-- There's probably nothing harder in life than losing a child. That set her off and she now can deliver something similar to, "How do you find your inner strength and inner resilience when things don't seem to be going really well, whether in the world or personally?"
Bill: Yeah. Now, you got anything about losing children [crosstalk]
Liz: This is insane. We got to change this conversation. Yeah.
Bill: I've seen a lot of it. My grandma's buried two kids, she just buried her step kid and I see it. I don't know. When people say like, "Oh, I want to live to hundred," I've seen so much tragedy in my life in 40 years that I'm not trying to live the hundred, which is a sad outlook. But it has been my reality.
Liz: Yeah, but you have [crosstalk] three kids. So, that might change.
Bill: Huh?
Liz: But you have three kids to live to hundred for, too.
Bill: That's true.
Liz: There's tragedy and blessings.
Bill: And I'm going to be a helicopter parent and I'm going to have them in bubbles. So, nothing will ever happen to that.
Josh: [laughs]
Liz: Exactly. You are going to snowplough a parent [crosstalk] challenge that comes towards them. Totally.
Bill: [laughs] It's really trying to protect three boys, it's not going to go well.
Liz: Oh, all three of yours are boys? Wow.
Bill: Yeah. The puppy is a girl. So, that's how I got my daughter.
Liz: Thank God. [laughs]
Bill: Yeah, no. They are out of their mind. You can hear them now.
Liz: That's a lot of energy.
Bill: They don't shut up. I love you guys.
Liz: No, but that's a lot of energy. Three boys.
Bill: Yeah, they're crazy, they're crazy. But it's fun. It keeps me moderately young I think.
Josh: Yeah.
Liz: It keeps you moving, if nothing else.
Bill: Well, I have really enjoyed this and I hope that you two have as well.
Liz: Absolutely.
Bill: I think it's super cool. If you do want to set up that space, that would be fun.
Liz: Yeah, we'd love to.
Josh: Yeah, I think that'd be really proud. I would love to do that. A while ago, I noticed this people in the FinTwit world, I think really struggling with burnout and stress. It's huge.
Bill: Yeah, I think that's fair, especially, in a bear market.
Josh: Yeah. This was probably maybe six months ago or something like that and then, I think people reached x and I posted something some people reached out. But I think also what's-- There's a lot of shame around that, which is interesting. I think there's a lot of machismo that's focused on like, "I can't say that I'm stressed and burned out." What were you going to say? You are reacting-- [crosstalk]
Bill: I've been thinking the whole conversation, one of the things that I've been thinking about is, I think there's probably a mental barrier, especially among older men, but I think men generally about admitting some of these issues, because like, "Oh, you're vulnerable. How could you possibly admit that?" So, I was thinking that would be an issue. Shame builds into that and all kinds of things.
Liz: No, without a doubt, it is. And that's part of why we do things like bring in male senior leaders to talk really candidly and openly. Because a lot of what we learn is by what we see. The more than you start seeing one conversation change one conversation moves somebody, one conversation connects with somebody, it builds on itself. Listen, I'm married to an Argentine, who works in finance. So, you've got the Latin machismo, the financial machismo. So, I totally get it, but you can change it over time.
Josh: If anyone is going to lead us in your leader inside your organization, I think you have to lead from a place of vulnerability, because that actually will buy people in. As hard as that is to do, you will have-- It's critical and I'll leave with this. A gentleman that we're so privileged to work with, he spent 24 years as a Marine fighter pilot, turned school principal, turned leadership coach. And no one's going to eff with Pete. But Pete will also be so wrong, so vulnerable about what he's good at, what he's bad at, his failings, but it's really critical. At the end of the day, he always goes back to this. There's this long study on human happiness that's still ongoing from Harvard. It's the longest, it's ongoing, they keep it going and like what creates happiness in life? Do you know, Bill, the number one thing?
Bill: I think family, experiences, and I don't know. I throw in something about an inner scorecard.
Josh: Yeah, it's pretty good. It's relationships.
Bill: Yeah.
Josh: If person has healthy relationships with their friends and family.
Bill: I can't believe [crosstalk] friends.
Liz: And colleagues.
Bill: I'm sorry to all my friends.
Liz: [laughs]
Josh: Yeah.
Liz: Yeah. What about your listeners, Bill? God.
Josh: Yeah.
Bill: Well, that would be a lot of relationships. I love them.
Liz: [laughs]
Bill: Some get very mad at me though sometimes. I'm just [crosstalk]. I don't know why you're so mad, but yeah, no, that make sense.
Josh: But that inspires trust and commitment from teams, or from family, or friends. It's basic stuff. It's very hard, but it's somewhat simple.
Bill: Yeah. Well, I think it would be awesome if we can set up a space. Let's coordinate. When the podcast drops and then, a time to do it after, but I think it would be a really cool example of what you do, and hopefully, give people a chance to see it in action. I'm a sales guy at heart. So, I hope you get some leads from this.
Josh: [laughs] We're open. We're open for business.
Liz: [laughs]
Bill: So, how can people contact you?
Josh: Yeah. you can go to getkunik.com and reach us that way. You can also find me on Twitter and I guess, Bill can show that-- [crosstalk]
Liz: Yeah, Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever. Josh Horowitz and Liz Gulliver. Pretty easy.
Bill: All right. Well, thank you very much for joining and I hope it was an enjoyable experience.
Josh: Yeah.
Liz: Great.
Josh: It's awesome. Thank you so much.
Liz: I like the puppy break.
Bill: Yeah, well, now I need to go tell my kids when I'm recording, be quiet but whatever.
[laughter]
Bill: The joy of working from home, right?
Liz: Exactly, exactly.
Bill: All right. Well, have a good one.
Josh: and Liz: You, too.
Liz: Great talking with you.
[music]