20 May 2024
Ben Erwin, President and CEO, Encore
Moderated by Michael C. Bush, CEO, Great Place To Work
Join us for a dynamic conversation featuring Ben Erwin, President & CEO of Encore, as he explains how joining Great Place To Work in the throes of the pandemic, when the hospitality industry was brought to a screeching halt, was the best time to invest in workplace culture. Ben will reveal the strategies and leadership principles that propelled the company to new heights and offer a compelling case study for why it’s never the wrong time to invest in your people and their experience at work.
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Show Transcript
Speaker 3 (00:00):
Please welcome to the stage, Ben Erwin, president and CEO of Encore, and Michael C. Bush, CEO of Great Place To Work.
Ben Erwin (00:22):
My security blanket right here.
Michael C. Bush (00:24):
Yeah, yeah. Is anybody working around [inaudible 00:00:29]?
Ben Erwin (00:29):
I don't know. I don't know, but I'm glad they're here.
Michael C. Bush (00:32):
Ben, great to be here with you. We've developed a great relationship both as partners and friends, so I'm grateful for that. And the business of Encore, if you could start there, I'm sure people are like, "What's Encore? What does Encore do?"
Ben Erwin (00:50):
Hopefully all of you know Encore, but if you don't, it's an incredible business. My Encore journey started nine years ago and I found this company that's all around producing incredible events like the one we're sitting in here today, all around the world with incredible hotel partners and our meeting planner customers. So it is a large event production business, think big, medium, small, corporate meetings taking place every day around the world. Last year we did 350,000 meetings for our customers in 20 different countries, but the secret sauce of the whole thing are our teams, our people. You're hearing some of them today, but it's an incredibly special place and I'm happy to tell the story.
Michael C. Bush (01:30):
Story. And I'm on stage usually once a week, and it's your people who are selflessly committed to taking care of my brand and what I do. They do it in a humble way. They all wear black shirts and are acting like they're invisible and they run around very focused on what they do. And I'm just so impressed by their seriousness, their commitment, their attention to every detail, and it always goes great. I haven't had a hookup in anything that I do, so I just want to give you all credit right here in your black Encore shirts right here.
Ben Erwin (02:09):
Look, it is an incredible business and I know we'll talk a little bit about it, but events can be incredibly stressful. It's stressful for certainly the planners putting on something amazing like the summit. It's stressful for presenters or speakers coming out on stage. And that service mindset of our teams to pull it off, it's something that spoke to me when I first found the business and I'm incredibly protective. I feel a deep sense of responsibility for the people in that service mindset, that hospitality mindset that makes our team so special to do what they do.
Michael C. Bush (02:44):
And we met at an interesting time, right in the Covid experience. We actually met in Las Vegas at the first gathering in Covid. We were all still nervous. We were definitely talking like 19 [inaudible 00:03:03]-
Ben Erwin (03:02):
We shook hands like this.
Michael C. Bush (03:04):
Yeah, yeah. So that was that time, which I remember two things. Number one we met from our dear friend, Michael Graham-
Ben Erwin (03:15):
Who's here today. Front row, there he is.
Michael C. Bush (03:21):
[inaudible 00:03:21] Stand up. So we give this man a shout-out for bringing us together. Here he is. You know, made it happen. And the thing that made it happen is two ways of respect. One was he respected a Great Place To Work and what we did, another he respected Encore and he respected you and he was like, "This would be good." And we met. And at that time you had almost no employees based on what had happened. And to me it was a fascinating time. I was even unsure if it was the right time, but you decided to get on the journey are great. Just wanted you to talk about that moment and why.
Ben Erwin (03:58):
Yeah. So for any of you who have had children, as they age, you forget all the fun that their first couple months on earth was where you weren't sleeping, you had no idea what you were really supposed to be doing. And I feel like that was Covid for us. We couldn't make sense of the world. And as we get further from it, I try to forget many, many of those days 'cause it was, as you can imagine, being in the events business in the middle of the pandemic was not a fun place to be. But I knew people getting together was going to be incredibly important when the world was ready to move on. And I also knew that the only way Encore could get to do what we enjoyed doing before the pandemic was if we could get our people and our teams that make this business so special there with us.
(04:50):
And so it was. I mean, you had this global business, we had 13,000 people and we literally had no revenue. And we're trying to explain to our owners and ourselves what you want to invest in. And this resonated as something to be intentional around in terms of how do we want to start our business effectively over again. And so you hear many of these incredible business leaders be interviewed on stage and inevitably somebody asks the question, if you could go back in time, what would you tell yourself? Or if you could start over 20 years ago, what would you do differently? And it's a purely hypothetical question, but we had that moment in time. We knew we would be a big business again, we knew our teams were at the center of allowing us to do what we do. And I also knew that I had an incredible human capital muscle in our business.
(05:44):
And so the ability to be very specific as a new first-time CEO, in the middle of a never-before-seen situation, I knew people would be at the center of what our story was. So we were very intentional with our strategy being around four things, one of which is wanting to be a Great Place To Work For All. And so when we got introduced, I knew it wasn't an easy time to do it, but I knew it was also a really unique time for us to be able to do it, which got us incredibly excited. And candidly, I think gave us in those darkest moments, confidence as a team of what we were building for. So we knew it wasn't going to be easy, but we could imagine something on the other side that we could be really proud of. And we knew we'd look back and judge ourselves on how we did it. And it was incredibly important that this was part of that story.
Michael C. Bush (06:33):
Part of being an entrepreneur, part of being a leader is believing what you need to believe. So at that moment, we needed to believe the world was going to come back and things were going to happen, and you had that belief and it did and then needed to believe that you were doing something that was attractive and powerful enough where people would come back and they did. And so they come back and then you survey them and it's like, yeah, strange way to welcome them back. But you do that because you're committed to listening and it happened. And tell me about you reviewing survey results and how that helped you, what it was like to get those insights and the kinds of changes you made based on some of the things you learned.
Ben Erwin (07:19):
Yeah, so look, it's a fabulous question and my background, I didn't have the benefit of growing up in the events business or in the hospitality business, but I fell in love with it when I got here. But my background has been in more strategy roles, and I remember I worked for this one mentor who told me strategy is not hard. Being honest about reality is hard. And I think it was that where the strategy of we're this incredible people-oriented services business committed to how do we make this the academy company to work for if you're in the event space? But we had to be honest about where we found ourselves and there was a ton to celebrate and our teams told us that, but there was more than a few areas that we weren't good enough. And I think it is having that information and creating an environment where, look, we can celebrate the good things, but we also knew what we needed to go work on.
(08:21):
And it helped challenge us as leaders, certainly our HR teams around how do you want to innovate to solve some of those pain points where our teams are telling us, hey, this is a great place to work, but there are things that need to get better. And we listened to them. I mean, if I think about the things that came out, work-life balance, right? We've talked about that over the last couple of days. If you're in the events business, it is an incredibly stressful day during the show, but it's also periods where there's incredible volumes of work. All of you I'm sure have experienced this. People want to go to meetings when you're not conflicted with personal family vacations or holidays. And so our spring and falls are busier than you can imagine. Summer's really slow. That's stressful on our teams. How do we innovate to solve that? How do we think about recognition and celebrate? I will say to my team, I love watching our team be heroes and they're heroes many, many days, but you don't want to ask them to be heroes every day.
(09:23):
That's not a sustainable model. So how do we lean into that? And also just engaging them in collaboration or decisions that impact them. So many times, and I'm certainly guilty of this in our drive to come up with new ideas, we think of what would make other people's jobs easy, not always listening or engaging with them and hey, how do we bring them into that process? And so those were three things that for all of us, we immediately went to work on, how do we solve work-life balance, how do we think about the opportunity to recognize more what's happening and how do we also think about just that engagement around decisioning that impacts people and pulling them into the conversation.
Michael C. Bush (10:07):
Is there anything that stands out to you thinking about getting survey results and then implementing a change, a significant change, perhaps using technology or otherwise around, hey, our people have this need, we're going to do something about that and make an investment to try and get them what they need?
Ben Erwin (10:24):
Look, there's probably two things, Michael, and I'll start with one that I know is incredibly important to a lot of people in here around just the importance and value and power of ERGs or in our language business resource groups. I think we recognized early on that engaging them in what we were trying to do could be incredibly important. And so even in some of those early days as our business was rapidly recovering as people were getting back to the business of events, it was how do we encourage those communities to be a part of the decision-making process? That sounds fairly straightforward, but I would argue for or challenge all of you that are in here, your business has management rhythms, there's an annual operating plan, there are probably quarterly leadership meetings, but how do you be really intentional around getting communities inside your business to be a part of where the decisions are taking place?
(11:24):
And so I have great confidence that my leaders, my team, we are thinking about what's best collectively for the business. But something really powerful happened when you invited representatives or leaders from our business resource groups into the room. One, you obviously had their IP, their intelligence to help us find better answers. But the other thing it did by democratizing the decision-making process, it led to more transparency. So even the decisions that were being made, there was more context. That transparency helped trust. So even if the decision didn't change or maybe we would've gotten there on our own by having that open environment, you benefited from more smart minds around the table, that's always great, but also just this feeling of transparency that let decisions be viewed with a bit more trust. So I think that was probably one, and we continue to benefit from that and would encourage all of you to find ways to make that a very formal, intentional part of your process.
(12:26):
The other thing is we are using technology to try to innovate into some of these things. I mentioned work-life balance and just the incredible seasonality inside our business. And you can imagine the personal stress when there's more work than you can get to and you're working 50, 60, 70 hours in a week because you just have events backed up. There are also periods where our business is quite slow and for our team members, many of whom are non-exempt hourly team members like your personal financial, well-being fluctuates with that.
(12:58):
It's great when there's a lot of work. It's tough when there aren't as many hours to go around. And so we've actually worked with UKG. I know there's a bunch of UKG people in the house, and I think we are the first company in the country using UKG's Wallet to actually allow our team members to bank overtime where they can put money away. We'll match a hundred dollars when they put $500 into that so that they can manage for their own financial wellbeing what's taking place. So again, I would love to be able to wave a wand and solve seasonality. I can't, but we can use technology in our processes to try to make lives for our teams better.
Michael C. Bush (13:43):
And so that's a perfect example of knowing people need something, but it's going to take money to get them what they need. And then the idea of matching in any aspect, which when you do that analysis on a spreadsheet, it says maybe this is a good idea, but maybe at another time, but you decide, no, I'm going to do this. So how do you balance as a leader that Excel spreadsheet, the needs of one very significant stakeholder, investors and the overall business and how you see what it needs, which is the short-term focus versus the long-term focus?
Ben Erwin (14:30):
Yeah, I think that is what I'm staring at my ceiling trying to figure out most nights. It is, I think for any leader, and I think it's any leader in any part of an organization, how do you balance what needs to get done in the short term to meet success criteria and what you're trying to build in the long term? And I think it's really complicated because the answer is you have to solve for both. But we have the good fortune as a business that's owned by Blackstone to have a partner that is willing to trust its leaders and how you find that right formula where we want today to be a great day to work at Encore, but we have to have tomorrow be a great day to work at Encore. And so I think you take comfort in values, things that are kind of non-negotiable, but you got to be willing to make some statements as it relates to long-term investments that you want to make.
(15:34):
And I think for us, people are always at the top of that. And if we can trade off maybe decisions somewhere else to protect that, we will in the long term. But if you're managing, and look, this was hard as a new leader to have confidence in, but if you're worried about the next a hundred days as a leader of the business, you are focused on the wrong things. There are parts of your business that need to be driving for those next a hundred days, but you better be putting chips down for a year or two years, three years out, or you're going to find yourself on the wrong side of that trade.
Michael C. Bush (16:06):
And we know from our data that leaders affect the experience of employees, and yet we also know that it's everyone's responsibility to create a Great Place To Work For All. You've built very talented leadership team, leaders like Charlie Young who hard to match that experience, the depth of that experience.
Ben Erwin (16:28):
Easy, easy on the Charlie compliments, it's going to be tough to manage him.
Michael C. Bush (16:32):
Oh, okay, because it's documented that this guy said those things.
Ben Erwin (16:36):
He's [inaudible 00:16:36]-
Michael C. Bush (16:36):
Well, let me give you one more, John [inaudible 00:16:39]-
Ben Erwin (16:40):
He's incredible.
Michael C. Bush (16:42):
Okay, let's talk about...
Ben Erwin (16:42):
All of them. Incredibly talented.
Michael C. Bush (16:42):
I can go on and on and on. And they all know their responsibility as leaders and what they need to do. But for the people who are not formally leaders but are leaders, they affect the work every day, they affect their teammates every day. What do you hope for them in terms of their contribution to creating a Great Place To Work For All?
Ben Erwin (17:01):
Look, I am a big believer and we all see this in our lives, the people that, you all could close your eyes and think for a moment, the people in your life and there's one or two that just every time you leave them, you feel better about yourself, you feel better about your relationship with them, and you have just a little extra energy in your step. And I think we all have that ability at work to be those people. And so look, I have loved watching the ERG's or BRG's in our organization take off. It's leadership at all levels, throwing themselves into a community that's working to make life better here, but also life better in the communities we're a part of. The great thing about Encore, doing what we do, putting on events, our purpose to connect and inspire, our teams can go out and do that.
(17:51):
We can get passionate about the things that matter to our different communities. And so I think ERGs, which is obviously a big focus this week, wildly important, but I think also leaders have an incredible opportunity in the people that they want to surround themselves with. The teams that you're building, hopefully all of you, and the fact you're here, you probably do, you work for a business that believes in a Great Place To Work For All. You work for a leader who believes in a Great Place To Work For All, but not everybody does. And the great thing is you don't have to. You can make your team a Great Place To Work. You can make your floor of your building a Great Place To Work. And so I think it's just how are you with the people that are around you doing these things? And it starts with how you're evaluating talent.
(18:35):
I will look at any organization and you can just think about a simple performance matrix, two by two box of how are performers low, high, how are their values low high. Organizations that have high values, high performance, those are easy decisions. Decisions where you have low performance, low values, those are easy decisions, but what are you doing in your business for the folks that fall in those other two quadrants? How are you culturally leading where you have somebody who may be a great performer, may not be sharing your values, and what are we doing for those that share our values may not yet be where we need to be. I think building that environment within your teams, within your department, making sure your organization leads that way. We all own that. We can all hold each other accountable for that. We can call each other out when we're not doing it and we can reward the people that are.
Michael C. Bush (19:23):
Yeah. Well, I know one thing about you from getting to know you is you've got a family and you've got this big responsibility. What kind of things do you try and do in terms of your work-life balance? I don't think there's any such thing really. Okay. But let's conceptually talk about how you keep two critically important things going.
Ben Erwin (19:49):
I think you're right. If you love what you do, like work is part of the joy, and I think you do try to find, if you're fortunate enough to find things in your life that you're good at that bring you joy and can have a career in that, life's a wonderful place, but I think it's bringing your family along for part of that. I have two teenage daughters. They are as invested in watching our teams, watching this industry be a part of it. And so I think it is trying to blur those lines a bit. They know how important this is to me. They know how important all of our teams are to me, and they want to be a part of it. And it is incredibly fun to watch them join some of that conversation as well. But obviously you're finding time to bribe them, generally, to be with you, but it's those things that I think remind you of what you're trying to build in the world and where you want them to ultimately work and what they want to ultimately do with their lives.
Michael C. Bush (20:53):
Well, you've got two daughters, so you've got four more to go to catch up to Chris.
Ben Erwin (20:57):
Yeah. Chris reminds me of many, many things. I don't think that's the one I'm competing with Chris head on. There's a few others in our mutually shared relationship, but that's not one.
Michael C. Bush (21:10):
All right. Any final thoughts you'd like to share with the audience or here as a CEO? I also just admire you going into sessions and sitting and learning. That's uncommon behavior, but I think it's remarkable. What kinds of things have you picked up over the last couple of days?
Ben Erwin (21:29):
Well, look, maybe I'll take both of those and combine them. Just don't stop learning. I'm a big believer and it's how we got introduced. I love learning from other people. I think of some of the voices, whether it's reading books that you can learn from others, business leaders. I genuinely believe there's a ton we can all learn from each other. And so I think just finding those opportunities. I love sitting in this room and letting my mind just wander to the wisdom of other people that are up here. And so I just find that personal board that you can bounce ideas off. You've been an incredible voice in my ear. I think we all have those, but I'd be very intentional in finding who are those voices that can be that thought starter so we all can continue to learn and change and ultimately continue to develop.
Michael C. Bush (22:22):
Okay. Please give a warm thank you to Ben Erwin.
Please welcome to the stage, Ben Erwin, president and CEO of Encore, and Michael C. Bush, CEO of Great Place To Work.
Ben Erwin (00:22):
My security blanket right here.
Michael C. Bush (00:24):
Yeah, yeah. Is anybody working around [inaudible 00:00:29]?
Ben Erwin (00:29):
I don't know. I don't know, but I'm glad they're here.
Michael C. Bush (00:32):
Ben, great to be here with you. We've developed a great relationship both as partners and friends, so I'm grateful for that. And the business of Encore, if you could start there, I'm sure people are like, "What's Encore? What does Encore do?"
Ben Erwin (00:50):
Hopefully all of you know Encore, but if you don't, it's an incredible business. My Encore journey started nine years ago and I found this company that's all around producing incredible events like the one we're sitting in here today, all around the world with incredible hotel partners and our meeting planner customers. So it is a large event production business, think big, medium, small, corporate meetings taking place every day around the world. Last year we did 350,000 meetings for our customers in 20 different countries, but the secret sauce of the whole thing are our teams, our people. You're hearing some of them today, but it's an incredibly special place and I'm happy to tell the story.
Michael C. Bush (01:30):
Story. And I'm on stage usually once a week, and it's your people who are selflessly committed to taking care of my brand and what I do. They do it in a humble way. They all wear black shirts and are acting like they're invisible and they run around very focused on what they do. And I'm just so impressed by their seriousness, their commitment, their attention to every detail, and it always goes great. I haven't had a hookup in anything that I do, so I just want to give you all credit right here in your black Encore shirts right here.
Ben Erwin (02:09):
Look, it is an incredible business and I know we'll talk a little bit about it, but events can be incredibly stressful. It's stressful for certainly the planners putting on something amazing like the summit. It's stressful for presenters or speakers coming out on stage. And that service mindset of our teams to pull it off, it's something that spoke to me when I first found the business and I'm incredibly protective. I feel a deep sense of responsibility for the people in that service mindset, that hospitality mindset that makes our team so special to do what they do.
Michael C. Bush (02:44):
And we met at an interesting time, right in the Covid experience. We actually met in Las Vegas at the first gathering in Covid. We were all still nervous. We were definitely talking like 19 [inaudible 00:03:03]-
Ben Erwin (03:02):
We shook hands like this.
Michael C. Bush (03:04):
Yeah, yeah. So that was that time, which I remember two things. Number one we met from our dear friend, Michael Graham-
Ben Erwin (03:15):
Who's here today. Front row, there he is.
Michael C. Bush (03:21):
[inaudible 00:03:21] Stand up. So we give this man a shout-out for bringing us together. Here he is. You know, made it happen. And the thing that made it happen is two ways of respect. One was he respected a Great Place To Work and what we did, another he respected Encore and he respected you and he was like, "This would be good." And we met. And at that time you had almost no employees based on what had happened. And to me it was a fascinating time. I was even unsure if it was the right time, but you decided to get on the journey are great. Just wanted you to talk about that moment and why.
Ben Erwin (03:58):
Yeah. So for any of you who have had children, as they age, you forget all the fun that their first couple months on earth was where you weren't sleeping, you had no idea what you were really supposed to be doing. And I feel like that was Covid for us. We couldn't make sense of the world. And as we get further from it, I try to forget many, many of those days 'cause it was, as you can imagine, being in the events business in the middle of the pandemic was not a fun place to be. But I knew people getting together was going to be incredibly important when the world was ready to move on. And I also knew that the only way Encore could get to do what we enjoyed doing before the pandemic was if we could get our people and our teams that make this business so special there with us.
(04:50):
And so it was. I mean, you had this global business, we had 13,000 people and we literally had no revenue. And we're trying to explain to our owners and ourselves what you want to invest in. And this resonated as something to be intentional around in terms of how do we want to start our business effectively over again. And so you hear many of these incredible business leaders be interviewed on stage and inevitably somebody asks the question, if you could go back in time, what would you tell yourself? Or if you could start over 20 years ago, what would you do differently? And it's a purely hypothetical question, but we had that moment in time. We knew we would be a big business again, we knew our teams were at the center of allowing us to do what we do. And I also knew that I had an incredible human capital muscle in our business.
(05:44):
And so the ability to be very specific as a new first-time CEO, in the middle of a never-before-seen situation, I knew people would be at the center of what our story was. So we were very intentional with our strategy being around four things, one of which is wanting to be a Great Place To Work For All. And so when we got introduced, I knew it wasn't an easy time to do it, but I knew it was also a really unique time for us to be able to do it, which got us incredibly excited. And candidly, I think gave us in those darkest moments, confidence as a team of what we were building for. So we knew it wasn't going to be easy, but we could imagine something on the other side that we could be really proud of. And we knew we'd look back and judge ourselves on how we did it. And it was incredibly important that this was part of that story.
Michael C. Bush (06:33):
Part of being an entrepreneur, part of being a leader is believing what you need to believe. So at that moment, we needed to believe the world was going to come back and things were going to happen, and you had that belief and it did and then needed to believe that you were doing something that was attractive and powerful enough where people would come back and they did. And so they come back and then you survey them and it's like, yeah, strange way to welcome them back. But you do that because you're committed to listening and it happened. And tell me about you reviewing survey results and how that helped you, what it was like to get those insights and the kinds of changes you made based on some of the things you learned.
Ben Erwin (07:19):
Yeah, so look, it's a fabulous question and my background, I didn't have the benefit of growing up in the events business or in the hospitality business, but I fell in love with it when I got here. But my background has been in more strategy roles, and I remember I worked for this one mentor who told me strategy is not hard. Being honest about reality is hard. And I think it was that where the strategy of we're this incredible people-oriented services business committed to how do we make this the academy company to work for if you're in the event space? But we had to be honest about where we found ourselves and there was a ton to celebrate and our teams told us that, but there was more than a few areas that we weren't good enough. And I think it is having that information and creating an environment where, look, we can celebrate the good things, but we also knew what we needed to go work on.
(08:21):
And it helped challenge us as leaders, certainly our HR teams around how do you want to innovate to solve some of those pain points where our teams are telling us, hey, this is a great place to work, but there are things that need to get better. And we listened to them. I mean, if I think about the things that came out, work-life balance, right? We've talked about that over the last couple of days. If you're in the events business, it is an incredibly stressful day during the show, but it's also periods where there's incredible volumes of work. All of you I'm sure have experienced this. People want to go to meetings when you're not conflicted with personal family vacations or holidays. And so our spring and falls are busier than you can imagine. Summer's really slow. That's stressful on our teams. How do we innovate to solve that? How do we think about recognition and celebrate? I will say to my team, I love watching our team be heroes and they're heroes many, many days, but you don't want to ask them to be heroes every day.
(09:23):
That's not a sustainable model. So how do we lean into that? And also just engaging them in collaboration or decisions that impact them. So many times, and I'm certainly guilty of this in our drive to come up with new ideas, we think of what would make other people's jobs easy, not always listening or engaging with them and hey, how do we bring them into that process? And so those were three things that for all of us, we immediately went to work on, how do we solve work-life balance, how do we think about the opportunity to recognize more what's happening and how do we also think about just that engagement around decisioning that impacts people and pulling them into the conversation.
Michael C. Bush (10:07):
Is there anything that stands out to you thinking about getting survey results and then implementing a change, a significant change, perhaps using technology or otherwise around, hey, our people have this need, we're going to do something about that and make an investment to try and get them what they need?
Ben Erwin (10:24):
Look, there's probably two things, Michael, and I'll start with one that I know is incredibly important to a lot of people in here around just the importance and value and power of ERGs or in our language business resource groups. I think we recognized early on that engaging them in what we were trying to do could be incredibly important. And so even in some of those early days as our business was rapidly recovering as people were getting back to the business of events, it was how do we encourage those communities to be a part of the decision-making process? That sounds fairly straightforward, but I would argue for or challenge all of you that are in here, your business has management rhythms, there's an annual operating plan, there are probably quarterly leadership meetings, but how do you be really intentional around getting communities inside your business to be a part of where the decisions are taking place?
(11:24):
And so I have great confidence that my leaders, my team, we are thinking about what's best collectively for the business. But something really powerful happened when you invited representatives or leaders from our business resource groups into the room. One, you obviously had their IP, their intelligence to help us find better answers. But the other thing it did by democratizing the decision-making process, it led to more transparency. So even the decisions that were being made, there was more context. That transparency helped trust. So even if the decision didn't change or maybe we would've gotten there on our own by having that open environment, you benefited from more smart minds around the table, that's always great, but also just this feeling of transparency that let decisions be viewed with a bit more trust. So I think that was probably one, and we continue to benefit from that and would encourage all of you to find ways to make that a very formal, intentional part of your process.
(12:26):
The other thing is we are using technology to try to innovate into some of these things. I mentioned work-life balance and just the incredible seasonality inside our business. And you can imagine the personal stress when there's more work than you can get to and you're working 50, 60, 70 hours in a week because you just have events backed up. There are also periods where our business is quite slow and for our team members, many of whom are non-exempt hourly team members like your personal financial, well-being fluctuates with that.
(12:58):
It's great when there's a lot of work. It's tough when there aren't as many hours to go around. And so we've actually worked with UKG. I know there's a bunch of UKG people in the house, and I think we are the first company in the country using UKG's Wallet to actually allow our team members to bank overtime where they can put money away. We'll match a hundred dollars when they put $500 into that so that they can manage for their own financial wellbeing what's taking place. So again, I would love to be able to wave a wand and solve seasonality. I can't, but we can use technology in our processes to try to make lives for our teams better.
Michael C. Bush (13:43):
And so that's a perfect example of knowing people need something, but it's going to take money to get them what they need. And then the idea of matching in any aspect, which when you do that analysis on a spreadsheet, it says maybe this is a good idea, but maybe at another time, but you decide, no, I'm going to do this. So how do you balance as a leader that Excel spreadsheet, the needs of one very significant stakeholder, investors and the overall business and how you see what it needs, which is the short-term focus versus the long-term focus?
Ben Erwin (14:30):
Yeah, I think that is what I'm staring at my ceiling trying to figure out most nights. It is, I think for any leader, and I think it's any leader in any part of an organization, how do you balance what needs to get done in the short term to meet success criteria and what you're trying to build in the long term? And I think it's really complicated because the answer is you have to solve for both. But we have the good fortune as a business that's owned by Blackstone to have a partner that is willing to trust its leaders and how you find that right formula where we want today to be a great day to work at Encore, but we have to have tomorrow be a great day to work at Encore. And so I think you take comfort in values, things that are kind of non-negotiable, but you got to be willing to make some statements as it relates to long-term investments that you want to make.
(15:34):
And I think for us, people are always at the top of that. And if we can trade off maybe decisions somewhere else to protect that, we will in the long term. But if you're managing, and look, this was hard as a new leader to have confidence in, but if you're worried about the next a hundred days as a leader of the business, you are focused on the wrong things. There are parts of your business that need to be driving for those next a hundred days, but you better be putting chips down for a year or two years, three years out, or you're going to find yourself on the wrong side of that trade.
Michael C. Bush (16:06):
And we know from our data that leaders affect the experience of employees, and yet we also know that it's everyone's responsibility to create a Great Place To Work For All. You've built very talented leadership team, leaders like Charlie Young who hard to match that experience, the depth of that experience.
Ben Erwin (16:28):
Easy, easy on the Charlie compliments, it's going to be tough to manage him.
Michael C. Bush (16:32):
Oh, okay, because it's documented that this guy said those things.
Ben Erwin (16:36):
He's [inaudible 00:16:36]-
Michael C. Bush (16:36):
Well, let me give you one more, John [inaudible 00:16:39]-
Ben Erwin (16:40):
He's incredible.
Michael C. Bush (16:42):
Okay, let's talk about...
Ben Erwin (16:42):
All of them. Incredibly talented.
Michael C. Bush (16:42):
I can go on and on and on. And they all know their responsibility as leaders and what they need to do. But for the people who are not formally leaders but are leaders, they affect the work every day, they affect their teammates every day. What do you hope for them in terms of their contribution to creating a Great Place To Work For All?
Ben Erwin (17:01):
Look, I am a big believer and we all see this in our lives, the people that, you all could close your eyes and think for a moment, the people in your life and there's one or two that just every time you leave them, you feel better about yourself, you feel better about your relationship with them, and you have just a little extra energy in your step. And I think we all have that ability at work to be those people. And so look, I have loved watching the ERG's or BRG's in our organization take off. It's leadership at all levels, throwing themselves into a community that's working to make life better here, but also life better in the communities we're a part of. The great thing about Encore, doing what we do, putting on events, our purpose to connect and inspire, our teams can go out and do that.
(17:51):
We can get passionate about the things that matter to our different communities. And so I think ERGs, which is obviously a big focus this week, wildly important, but I think also leaders have an incredible opportunity in the people that they want to surround themselves with. The teams that you're building, hopefully all of you, and the fact you're here, you probably do, you work for a business that believes in a Great Place To Work For All. You work for a leader who believes in a Great Place To Work For All, but not everybody does. And the great thing is you don't have to. You can make your team a Great Place To Work. You can make your floor of your building a Great Place To Work. And so I think it's just how are you with the people that are around you doing these things? And it starts with how you're evaluating talent.
(18:35):
I will look at any organization and you can just think about a simple performance matrix, two by two box of how are performers low, high, how are their values low high. Organizations that have high values, high performance, those are easy decisions. Decisions where you have low performance, low values, those are easy decisions, but what are you doing in your business for the folks that fall in those other two quadrants? How are you culturally leading where you have somebody who may be a great performer, may not be sharing your values, and what are we doing for those that share our values may not yet be where we need to be. I think building that environment within your teams, within your department, making sure your organization leads that way. We all own that. We can all hold each other accountable for that. We can call each other out when we're not doing it and we can reward the people that are.
Michael C. Bush (19:23):
Yeah. Well, I know one thing about you from getting to know you is you've got a family and you've got this big responsibility. What kind of things do you try and do in terms of your work-life balance? I don't think there's any such thing really. Okay. But let's conceptually talk about how you keep two critically important things going.
Ben Erwin (19:49):
I think you're right. If you love what you do, like work is part of the joy, and I think you do try to find, if you're fortunate enough to find things in your life that you're good at that bring you joy and can have a career in that, life's a wonderful place, but I think it's bringing your family along for part of that. I have two teenage daughters. They are as invested in watching our teams, watching this industry be a part of it. And so I think it is trying to blur those lines a bit. They know how important this is to me. They know how important all of our teams are to me, and they want to be a part of it. And it is incredibly fun to watch them join some of that conversation as well. But obviously you're finding time to bribe them, generally, to be with you, but it's those things that I think remind you of what you're trying to build in the world and where you want them to ultimately work and what they want to ultimately do with their lives.
Michael C. Bush (20:53):
Well, you've got two daughters, so you've got four more to go to catch up to Chris.
Ben Erwin (20:57):
Yeah. Chris reminds me of many, many things. I don't think that's the one I'm competing with Chris head on. There's a few others in our mutually shared relationship, but that's not one.
Michael C. Bush (21:10):
All right. Any final thoughts you'd like to share with the audience or here as a CEO? I also just admire you going into sessions and sitting and learning. That's uncommon behavior, but I think it's remarkable. What kinds of things have you picked up over the last couple of days?
Ben Erwin (21:29):
Well, look, maybe I'll take both of those and combine them. Just don't stop learning. I'm a big believer and it's how we got introduced. I love learning from other people. I think of some of the voices, whether it's reading books that you can learn from others, business leaders. I genuinely believe there's a ton we can all learn from each other. And so I think just finding those opportunities. I love sitting in this room and letting my mind just wander to the wisdom of other people that are up here. And so I just find that personal board that you can bounce ideas off. You've been an incredible voice in my ear. I think we all have those, but I'd be very intentional in finding who are those voices that can be that thought starter so we all can continue to learn and change and ultimately continue to develop.
Michael C. Bush (22:22):
Okay. Please give a warm thank you to Ben Erwin.
