In our post-pandemic world, the most common concerns among business owners tend to center around staffing. How do we hire, train, and retain great staff? In this episode, Kevin Wilhelm, the founder and President of Pod Marketing/Marketing4ECPs, shares how he built an award-winning corporate culture that his employees celebrate. They have an annual awards event at the company every year! One lesson in attracting high-quality talent for your business is telling your story to the right person at the right time. Business owners should create unique things that attract top talents into their business instead of doing what everyone does because they’re putting themselves in the middle of a commodity. Learn more by tuning in to this episode today.
Connect with Kevin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connect-with-kevin
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How To Attract And Retain TOP TALENT - Kevin Wilhelm, Marketing4ECPs
Thank you again for joining me on another episode. Thank you for all the support. As always, I'm going to ask a quick request right off the top. If you get any value out of this episode, and you absolutely will, I can guarantee it. If you have gotten any value out of previous episodes, please share it. Send a link to your friend, leave a review, leave a comment, put a link up on LinkedIn, Instagram, or wherever, and take a screenshot.
Let everybody know that you're tuned into this conversation with me and my amazing guest, Mr. Kevin Wilhelm from POD Marketing and Marketing4ECPs. Kevin is the Founder and President of POD Marketing, but of course, we see the Marketing4ECPs side of it a little more. He's a published author of an Amazon bestseller.
More recently, POD Marketing won an award for Best Corporate Culture. That's what we're going to be talking about in this conversation. How to develop a great corporate culture and how to attract and retain top talent? Kevin is a master at that. We're going to dive deep into that. Kevin, thank you so much for joining me on the show.
As always, absolutely.
I gave a quick rundown of who you are. Tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do.
I'm a family man. I have three beautiful kids and a beautiful wife. We live in Calgary. I've been running POD Marketing for ten years. It’s not quite a startup, but it feels that way every day, the way that we move. I enjoy building teams. I enjoy being part of what other people are creating. I also love the industry that we're in, which is the eye care industry, and helping it move to the next level. I love what I do.
That's awesome to hear. We don't hear that enough that you love what you do. A lot of times I'll be talking to somebody and they're just like, "Yeah, it's fine." It always makes me sad. If you're not watching, you should go to YouTube and watch the video. I want to comment on this quickly. You're sitting in this nice office space with lots of windows. I could see some bottles in the background. It got this Mad Men feel to where you are. The next time we have to record this in person, I'll probably slip up and slur my words as much as when I'm sober sitting here.
Let's dive into this. Corporate culture or company culture is more of a hot topic now. It’s more relevant than it ever has been. With all of the difficulties people are having with staffing and hiring, spending more time developing that culture and building a workspace where people are happy to be is more important than ever.
I want to lay this up for you. If you could take us step by step. Let's say you're in a place where there's not much of a corporate culture. It’s not necessarily a negative place, but there's not much to speak of. What are the steps for developing that culture? What have you guys done? Before we even go into that, I mentioned right off the top that you recently won an award. Tell me about that award and what that was about.
We're proud of this. We're based in Calgary. We felt like we're Calgary's best-kept secret because our clients are all over Canada and the United States. From a local perspective, marketers don't know about us because they don't see us winning big clients that are local brands, and even support independent optometry.
We believe we have a great company to work for, and we'll get into why. One of our objectives, as we continue to grow, is we want to attract and then retain the best talent that we can find. With all the work we put into our culture, one of our objectives was to start marketing ourselves. Get out there and start becoming a known entity in the city so that we start attracting great grads from university and great marketers from other agencies and companies, and bring them here.
One of those things was we wanted to look for some recognition. We were named one of the Most Admired Corporate Cultures in Canada by Waterstone Capital based out of Toronto. It is a very prestigious award. We're very proud of it. It's a pretty intense interview process. It took months with many people applying for that. It goes from a vision and perspective. It talks about employee treatment. It talks about financial performance as well. Is there an opportunity for growth? It's not about perks. It's about the programs and policies in place for employees to make sure that they're engaged, motivated, and fulfilled.
Pod Marketing is named one of the Most Admired Corporate Cultures in Canada by Waterstone Capital, based in Toronto.
Congratulations. From what I've experienced, speaking to different people throughout the company, it's legit. People always seem to be happy and excited when I talk to them. That's cool. It makes you the perfect person to speak on this topic. Once again, going back to my question, how do we start? What do we look at? What are the steps?
The first thing is to identify what your culture is. I'm going to equate it to other advice that I give from a marketing perspective which is, "Why do patients choose your practice?" What are you doing intentionally to remove yourself from the commodity of price and convenience? If you are only chosen on price and convenience, it's a tough business model. Somebody more inexpensive and more convenient will win those patients.
The same goes for employees. Convenience is, "Are you close to my house? Are you allowing me to work from home? What's the flexibility?" Price is, "How much are you paying me?" The first thing is to identify what you are intentionally doing and what can you provide to employees or team members that will attract them to want to work for you. Of course, there's a whole other part of it, which is retention.
The first one is the identification of, "What is my culture today?" I define culture as traditions plus norms and values. Those three areas all have a place. Traditions are, "What are the celebrations we do? What are the meeting pulses? What are the holiday parties?" It‘s those kinds of traditions that people look forward to like how you celebrate birthdays or what have you.
Norms are, "How are we greeted in the morning? How do we treat one another? What is the software stack?" Those things matter based on, "Am I using an antiquated patient management software that's frustrating? Is it high-tech and cool or different? Are they bringing in new equipment and new systems to advance my learning?" That's part of the culture.
Values are the most important which are core values. Most corporate cultures will win or lose on the creation, implementation, and compliance of corporate values. You can get those three things and identify them. If you don't feel you have them, then I would first start there. What are your traditions? What are those norms? Of course, focusing on the core values that need to be the pillar of any great corporate culture.
Top Talent: Focus on the core values that must be the pillar of any great corporate culture.
That's super helpful. We've talked about business and things like that. The number one thing in most cases is to have a look and do a little introspection. Understand where you're at and what is your standing in all of these categories. Breaking culture down into those three things, traditions, norms, and values is helpful.
Thank you for defining them because that way, you can go back to your workspace and look at those different pillars. Once you've taken a look and you are able to say, "I don't even know what my culture is" or "I don't have a defined core value," maybe we start there. We don't have defined core values. What do we do next?
This is the exercise that I would do. I would get in a staff meeting, have your staff come together, and start to write out on Post-it Notes or pieces of paper what your current values are today. What they believe them to be. It’s not aspirational and not what we want to be, but who are we today, and what do we value about one another? Everybody writes as many as they can.
We then put them on a big boardroom table, you put them in the middle, and you start grouping them and see the patterns that start existing. Once you start seeing the patterns, you might have 7, 8, or 9, then you want to focus on the ones that represent who we are and what makes up the DNA of our company today.
We did this exercise years ago. We started to notice a lot of optimism and an optimistic outlook. There was a lot about the positivity side. We combined those and positivity became one of them. You start to see these patterns, and then you identify and you articulate, "That's what this value is." As the owner, CEO, or whatever position you hold in your company, it is your job to articulate 2 to 3 sentences about what that value means to the organization and you as the leader.
One of our core values is integrity. In marketing, everybody has had a bad experience at some point with a marketing company. It's important that we have integrity. The way that I structured it is we're all human beings and we're going to make mistakes. When that happens, are you putting your hand up and saying, "That was my mistake?" That’s accountability.
Are you also holding your head up and saying, "I'm okay. I've made that mistake, but I'm bringing a plan to not let it happen again. I'm holding my accountability. Do I hold to the commitments that I make? Can my team trust me? When I say I'm going to get this thing delivered on time, do I hold my words?" We define that value.
I sit down with every new employee personally and I walk them through each value that we have. I walk them through the definition of what it means, and then I share examples. I highlight when Ashley showed integrity as an example of a workspace so the new employee could understand and see it in action.
Furthermore, when we do staff meetings, we take the first 10 to 15 minutes to highlight examples of people demonstrating these core values. Throughout the month, there's an ability for them to nominate up here. They get one nomination a month. They say, "Ashley demonstrated this example." We put it in a box or, in our case, we email it in. I will pick the top ones and read them aloud. We recognize people for living our core values. We don't go more than 30 days without highlighting them, speaking about them, and recognizing them. They're truly ingrained in our organization from top to bottom.
Do you make it mandatory that everybody should put one of those in or is it voluntary? Do you get months where nobody nominates the person or there's always something?
We probably have over 50 nominations per value. I then take hours to whittle that down to pick the stories that are impactful. I also want to spread out the recognition a little bit to people that haven't been on. At the end of the year, we have an award ceremony. It's one of our traditions. In the office, we do the potties. It's POD Marketing, so we call it the potties. Our trophy is a glass toilet because it's a potty. We give a potty away for each of our core values who has had the most nominations in a year, and then an overall core value award winner. They maintain that for a year.
Monthly, you ask the staff to put in these nominations, and they voluntarily put in lots of nominations. They're nominating their colleagues, highlighting the big stuff, and celebrating the good stuff that they're doing. You keep track of all of that and you give out awards at the end of the year. That's so cool. I'm going to try to start doing that.
Our team is not nearly as big as yours, but I like that idea. I think that's very cool. You mentioned that you spend time individually with each person. You've told me that before and I found that incredible. How valuable do you think that is? It’s a rhetorical question here, but for someone like myself who is a business owner and own a clinic with 8 or 10 staff, do you recommend that I sit down with each one to check in on how they're doing? How valuable do you think that would be?
It grossly has an underestimated value. We do hire lots. Right now, we're over 120 full-time employees. We have grown dramatically in the last few years. We end up having an onboarding week. We bring everybody in. They know the hiring dates throughout the year. We're on average about 6 to 8 people a month. They come together as a cohort, and then they go through a week of training. They're meeting different departments. They're understanding the verticals. They're getting training in eye care specifically. They understand the story.
The very last meeting of the week is the Friday 3:00 time slot. I come in and I deliver a culture presentation. I have a full slide deck. I talk about our traditions, norms, values, purpose, and vision. I talk about performance against culture, and how you can have high performers and high culture. That's what we're looking for. There are people that are high performers but have low culture. I explicitly explain to them, "If you are somebody who's a high performer but low culture, you will not be in this organization.” There is no room. We have to take you up.
Be careful of this. It doesn't mean you're a bad person. It means that the culture may not fit you. An example is the way that we grow and the way that we move in digital marketing is changing so fast. We have to be dynamic. We have to think on our feet and be willing to change at a drop of a hat. Working for me, you have to be even faster. If you're somebody who fights change, you might be the nicest person in the world, but you're not going to be the right fit culturally because you have to lean into change. It might just be the wrong fit, which is fine, but we can't have you in this organization. We have to find those people that fit the culture.
Top Talent: The way that we grow and the way that we move in digital marketing are changing so fast. We have to be dynamic. We must think on our feet and be willing to change at a drop of a hat. Working for Kevin Wilhelm, you have to be even faster.
I spend time with them at the end of that meeting, and then I do a 60-day check-in. I'm asking them, "How has the support been? How has the training been? How has your onboarding been? Do you have the materials and the resources that you need?" They meet with different people. They meet with our Vice President of Operations 30 days in.
Other than that, across the board, every team member has a one-on-one every week. It's a minimum of 30 minutes. That is what can make a massive difference in the organization. It’s having that time. People value time with their boss or their manager more than anything else. Many business owners or managers say, "I don't even know what to talk to them about. What am I going to say every week?"
Ultimately, it's five minutes of person-to-person connection, "How are you?" Genuinely care about them as a person. Make sure you're checking that way, and then, "What's on your list? How can I support you?" They should come with what they need. Let's think of an optician. It might be, "I'm struggling with this brand. I don't love the brand. I'm not selling this brand. I don't believe in the brand."
We can have an honest conversation about, "I'm struggling with Becky and I have a personal conflict. I would love to have some advice on how to deal with Becky." Whatever that is, you're there for them. One-on-one time is important. At every one-on-one, we’re delivering feedback. Ideally, it's positive, but it might be something you notice they could do a little bit better.
Let's say you're having an issue with people showing up on time. In this case, we'll say Jennifer. "Jennifer, I've noticed that you're showing up on time every day for the last few weeks. I appreciate it. We're having a little trouble with everybody, but I wanted to pass along and say that I've noticed that you are, and I appreciate that." She will leave that meeting feeling fulfilled, validated, noticed, and present. She will be far more engaged. She brings that positivity into her workspace moving forward.
Now, let's go with Jason. "Jason, I've noticed that you're showing up a little bit late for the last couple of weeks. You're a big part of our team. I want to make sure I can support you. Is there something going on that I can help you with?" That feedback can immediately correct and go, "I can be better. That'd be great if we could do that." That little feedback checks it, as opposed to letting resentment build up.
Jason impacts everybody by being late and nothing happens to Jason. That's where culture gets away from us. When there is accountability, we're not recognizing the great behaviors. We're not dealing with undesirable behaviors at the moment, it seems like everyone can do what they want. That's where culture starts separating. It's not about the perks and it’s nice, but it's about the accountability and what's happening within the 9:00 to 5:00 or the 8:00 to 4:00 or that kind of system.
I can imagine that that's extremely powerful, the fact that you're able to take the time and sit down with everybody. Aiming this towards ECPs and someone like myself, I'm seeing patients most days when I'm in the office. I got to find time to sit down and chat with the staff in-between patients or lunch. Do you think the same 30-minute structure every week is the only way to do it? Do you feel like there's some flexibility around that?
As the owner, who would your direct reports be? Probably your office manager. You might have a senior head optician. They may need that 30 minutes. You might have 1 or 2 people that you are giving that dedicated time. They're the ones that then manage everybody else. They should be having a 15-minute check-in once a week.
It should be quick. It could be in the back, a walk around, or right before their shift. It's like, "On Wednesday if you're starting at 10:00, let's meet at 9:45. I want to do a quick check-in. If you have nothing on your agenda, great. I just want to make sure that you know that I have this time dedicated to you every week." It cascades down.
As the owner, you don't need to meet with everybody every week. Your direct reports, you're giving them that time. That way, it allows them to save the issues they might be having for that meeting as well. That also reduces the amount of one-off, "This isn't working. I don't like this." They can save it and have a list for that meeting, making it productive, and efficient for you. I would say, every direct report should have a check-in set aside every week for whatever you can make work. Maybe 15 minutes to 30 minutes. The employees will feel incredibly valued to know that they have space with somebody to have an open discussion.
Speaking for myself, I know that I need to get those check-ins and I don't do it often enough. Knowing from your perspective how powerful it has been for you, it's going to become a much bigger priority moving forward. You've taken a look at your traditions, norms, and values. You're starting to hash them out a little bit, develop a bit of a culture, and see what kind of culture you need. How do you use that?
The biggest issue facing most business owners these days is attracting and retaining top talent. The way the industries have been and the things that people are dealing with. Let's go to attracting. How do you start to attract high-quality talent to your business? Whether it's an optometry clinic or someone like yourself?
Let's go to marketing 101, which is telling your story to the right person at the right time. When we ask practice owners, "What makes you different and unique?" We hear so often, "We do the same thing as everyone else." "Why do I want to go there? What's the magnet? What’s pulling me there?" From an employee's perspective, "Why should I work there?"
If you are trying to be like everybody else, you will be right in the middle of a commodity. It's not all about money. I don't think you should have to overpay. Overpaying is a tax. It's a business tax of being perhaps an unremarkable employer. You can create other things that can attract them. We know people care about flexibility. I understand you need people to show up. What does flexibility look like within the job? Knowing there are boundaries, “I need you here from this time to here this time,” but what could flexibility look like?
People want autonomy. They want to know they own their role within boundaries. Speaking to those things in a job ad matters. The reputation of your practice matters. People want to work somewhere they are proud of. Think about your "About Us" page as both attracting patients and employees. It is typically the second most visited page on your website. Go onto your analytics. If you're a client of ours, talk to your clients and ask them where it ranks, and how many people are viewing the "About Us" page. It's much higher than most people think.
Customers and employees want to know who you are before they decide to commit to you, whether it's an hour or whether it's their career. Think about if you were on stage in front of 100 optometrists, 100 associates, and 100 opticians, and you have two minutes to give a pitch as to why they should come work for you. Knowing there are seven other people who are going to be on stage next. What are those two minutes? What's that elevator pitch?
If you don't have anything, great, then I would be working on finding out what employees care about. Is it paid? What are the paid time-off policies? What are the employee discounts? What about friends and family discounts? Are there snacks? There’s value in putting free snacks on their half-an-hour break. They don't have to go out and spend money, but they'll get granola bars and healthy snacks. It immediately raises satisfaction. It could be something like a Costco run a couple of times a month. The satisfaction goes through the roof.
Team builders. Once a month or once a quarter, we do something as a team. We go out and do axe throwing and kart racing, or go out and get our dogs together. Those are the traditions and norms. Those are the things that bring us together. If you're doing these things and talk about them on the "About Us" page, when you write a job ad, it's factual instead of emotional. You're dealing with an emotional person who's trying to make an investment in themselves.
What is your "About Us” page saying? What is your job ad saying? You can create video content and show a day-in-the-life interview. Have some of your employees on camera getting a testimonial about working there. That way, when they click on that page and they see the "Why work with us?" They can watch stories of potential colleagues talking about why they love it. "We get treated fairly. They appreciate us. I feel valued. I feel heard." Anyone who's looking for a job probably doesn't feel those things. Just by hearing someone say that, they go, "That's where I want to work."
Our employees, the ones that come to us will always say, "I've been on your YouTube channel. I'm on your Instagram." We promote our culture through those things. They're making decisions based on the content we're putting out and they're choosing to apply. It's a huge factor to tell your story and be intentional about what you're putting out in the world.
Have great referral programs for staff. Reward your staff. We do $500 if they stay past three months. People are a little bit more apt to recommend somebody to have them come in. Some of your best employees are the ones that were referred to you by existing employees because they share values. Friends share values. If you're value-aligned and that great employee makes a recommendation, they're probably value-aligned. You're pulling more people in that are already value-aligned.
It makes it so much better. There are high rewards for people to go out and find employees who work well. If you build a place where nobody wants to leave, it's so much easier to attract. When the spot opens up, there's a line of friends of your employees that want to work there. They're almost begging to do it, so you're not needing job boards. You have them lined up.
Usually, it's a referral program to bring in new patients, but you have a referral program for hiring. If somebody at your office or somebody who already works there refers somebody who gets hired and sticks around for at least three months, the person who referred them gets a reward. That's awesome. There are so many good points in there. I don't think I'm going to be able to go back and touch on each of them, but if you're tuning in, you'll probably want to rewind it.
The snack thing is something that I can tell you from my personal experience has been beneficial and powerful. It's a few hundred bucks a month or whatever the number is. It has more than 10X the value as far as how happy it makes the staff and the doctors. It's partly about the food because they want to be able to eat the food and drinks. It's also about you going out of your way to supply me with these goodies. It's the care and the intangible value that it brings as well.
These are amazing stuff that you guys are doing. I never thought about advertising the workplace. Interviewing the staff and putting that content out for potential staff or doctors to see. That's the stuff they want to know about. The "About Us" page being one of the most viewed makes a lot of sense. Would it make sense for an optometry clinic to have a "Why work with us" page? Is that something we can have hidden and we can share the link with prospective staff who are looking to work with us?
It's up to where the practice is. If you're growing your hiring and that's an issue, I would have it there. One thing I'll say is if prospective patients see this content. How much you value employees and how much you treat them and care about them, that only makes them want to work with you more as well. There's a huge benefit of knowing that you take care of your staff and it's a great place.
You know there's continuity and there's appreciation like, "As a patient, I have a choice where I go. I want to go somewhere that treats the people that are helping me and they treat them well." Advertising and promoting the workplace and what it's like has so many other ancillary benefits. Don't be shy about talking about the benefits of why someone should come and work for you.
Think about Google. Google's entire reputation is they're an engineering company, but its entire reputation skyrocketed when people found out how it treated employees. It all of a sudden became this amazingly cool business. All it was is a search engine. People's reputations or brand value skyrocketed because they get snacks on their slides and they get haircuts. All of a sudden, people are like, "I love Google." It's increasing their brand loyalty because of how they treat their employees.
It makes a lot of sense. I go to the About page almost immediately as well because I want to see the faces of the people, who they are, and read about them, and whatever business it may be that's usually service-related that I'm going to go to. If on the "About Us" page, the staff are bragging about why they love working there, I would feel a lot more likely to go see that place or to use their services.
You've encompassed in there both attracting and retaining. Any other things that you might want to touch on as far as building that culture? I love what you said in there about the tax. That's a cool point. Paying a higher wage is a tax on your lack of culture or the fact that you're not a remarkable business. Spend the money on becoming a remarkable business and maybe you won't have to pay your new or potential incoming staff as much. That won't be something that you have to pay. That's a cool point, too.
There's a basic hygiene of making sure people are paid fairly for what they do. In some cases, we are so desperate for somebody that we pay so much more to get them. It has a way to fracture the culture as well. Have pay bands that you're comfortable with, and then create a great experience that attracts people that are within those bands.
In this conversation of attracting talent for an optometry clinic, there are various levels of that or there are different categories of talent that we're trying to attract. It could be front-end staff, an optician, or a doctor. I'm sure there's a lot of overlap in the approach, but there will be also some differences. Lately, there has been a lot of talk about there being a shortage of doctors and high demand for doctors. Some of it is due to new corporations entering the market. Some of it is whatever the natural progression of the way the industry is going.
Either way, the result is that there are larger entities, FYidoctors, Specsavers, and the like that have lots of money that are giving incentives to doctors and new grads, particularly those coming out of school. "Come work for us for a few years. We'll cover your debt. We'll give you a big signing bonus." You've seen a lot of optometry practices. I don't want you to necessarily overstep or be too uncomfortable with the answer here, but do you have any suggestions for a smaller clinic like mine for example? How do you think we might go about attracting those doctors instead of them going to FYi and getting a big $50,000 bonus or something like that?
Number one is identifying and understanding why would an associate be attracted to work in independent practice. What could you offer them that they aren't offered there? For sure, there is a level of autonomy that they're going to get. At FYi, those places probably have some strict policies and a lot more corporate policies, and a lot more administrative tasks that they have to do that take them out of the general eye care, which is why they got into it.
It might be about helping more people. It could be autonomy in the job. I've seen a practice that does profit sharing. They take X and the rest is shared amongst others. There's a little bit more of an ownership or a WestJet model over that one. A lot of it is just how you treat them. I'm not saying anything about the chains. This is just in general. When it comes to managing people, treat them how they want to be treated. Do not treat them how you want to be treated. Treat them like adults. Show them the respect that they deserve knowing that they have a profession and they've invested in this. They're looking to grow their career.
When managing people, do not treat them how you want them to treat you. Treat them how they want you to treat them. Treat them like adults.
One other thing you can offer them is an exit buy-in option. There are the right shifts. Maybe you're giving up some of your shifts and ideal times for them because that's what you can offer them. They can play a role in the marketing per se or the HR policies. They can stretch their limits more than they would be, which potentially the chain.
Think about what are all the things that we have to offer that the conglomerate chains can't because of the policy process, what have you. Lean into those and you'll find the associates that want what you have. That's the key. You're marketing what you can offer. You'll find the people that share those values. It's hard to fight against signing bonuses, so what could you do? That's the question. Is it more paid time off? Is it offering them sabbaticals? Is it offering them more flexibility than what they can get elsewhere? Flexibility matters a lot right now. What type of flexibility can you provide that isn't available anywhere else?
You've been on the show before, and I don't remember if at that time I did this thing where I asked you the two questions at the end. It has been a while. I think you came in the early days of COVID. It's been long enough. I'll ask you the same questions again. First of all, where can people connect with you? Where can people connect with Marketing4ECPs if they want to learn more, or POD Marketing if they want to see more about the culture that you've built? Where should they go?
I'm everywhere. LinkedIn, my name's right there. Search me up on LinkedIn and connect. That's a great way. If you want to email me, it's Kevin@4ECPs.com. I will return emails, so feel free to email me directly, whether it's marketing or anything to do with what we shared here. I'm happy to share.
I forgot to say earlier, but I'll mention this now. This conversation with Kevin originally was supposed to be on marketing because we're going to be doing a series of marketing. I'm calling it the Marketing Corner as a little series of show episodes with different people from Marketing4ECPs, people who have expertise in different areas, whether it's brand building or social media.
We're going to do 4 or 5 of these throughout the year. We were originally going to be talking about the ABCs of marketing. Instead, we figured culture-building was probably a more relevant topic and a more pressing topic to talk about. Stay tuned for actual marketing-related conversations coming up very soon. We got those interviews lined up and going to be released over the next months or so slowly. Stay tuned for those conversations.
Usually, when I'm having these types of more in-depth conversations, these are the two questions I like to ask every guest. If you could step into a time machine and go back to a point in your life that was a difficult time. You're welcome to share that time if you like what happened, if not, at the very least, what advice would you give to yourself at that difficult time?
It would be probably my early to mid-20s. I had children which were early in my career. From trying to live the lifestyle that you need to live as a young parent and trying to provide, that was a tough time. The advice is to keep pushing. That's why I say that to a lot of people at this stage in life. The 20s are when you build a foundation. The 30s is when you start realizing that potential. The 40s is when you get to enjoy some of that. The 20s are supposed to be hard. You're supposed to put in the work. You're supposed to make some sacrifices and build the foundation for the rest of your life. I would say you're doing it right if you're in a similar situation.
Top Talent: The twenties are when you build a foundation. The thirties is when you start realizing that potential. The forties is when you get to enjoy some of that. The twenties are supposed to be hard.
The final question is in everything that you've done and all the success that's coming your way, how much of it would you say is due to luck, and how much is due to hard work?
I would say that you can only capitalize on luck if you've done the work to be ready for it. I will never downplay the value of hard work. It is the most important. When luck presents itself, you also have to be willing to lean into it and recognize it. It’s far more the hard work than the luck but I'm here in this part of the world and there's a lot of luck that went into that. You got to use what you get. I appreciate and I'm grateful for the luck that I have received in this world. I show that through hard work.
Any final words on culture or anything else you want to share before we wrap up?
If you're tuning in to this and investing time into trying to better yourself, you're already ten steps ahead of where you need to be. Keep investing in yourself and the profession. You have such a great show. You bring on amazing guests. A big kudos to everybody who's investing their own time to try to better themselves. That's the way to win. Great job.
If you're investing time into trying to better yourself, you're already ten steps ahead of where you need to be. Keep investing in yourself and the profession.
Thank you, Kevin. I appreciate it. You're one of those great guests. Thanks for sharing all your insights. Everybody, stay tuned because there are going to be a lot more marketing-related concepts and discussions coming up. They're going to be extremely beneficial, not just for business owners but for anybody who's trying to get themselves out there more and take advantage of the platforms that are available to us.
Stay tuned for that. Thanks again, Kevin. I appreciate all your insights. Thank you, everybody, who's been tuning in. Make sure you leave a review, leave a comment, hit like, and share it with some friends. I will be back again on Canada's number one optometry show in the next episode very soon. Take care.
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About Kevin Wilhelm
Kevin Wilhelm is the President of Marketing4ECPs, a digital agency that specializes in supporting independent eye care professionals with their branding, lead generation, and online presence. He is a published author, speaker, and even has an online course on udemy.com. He loves to share his knowledge and experiences with other entrepreneurs when it comes to building and marketing companies.