In this episode, Tony Cline, Chief Success Officer at ONYX, talks through the difference between bravery and courage, why courage is so essential for property managers in today’s fast-changing environment, and how you can build courage as a leader while getting your team onboard with change. Whether you’re just getting your company off the ground or managing hundreds of doors, this episode contains plenty of insights for you.
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Season 5 Episode 6 features Tony Cline, Chief Success Officer at ONYX, a property management coaching business.
The Triple Win Property Management Podcast is produced and distributed by Second Nature.
Andrew Smallwood
Hello, professional property managers! Andrew Smallwood here, Chief Customer Officer and host of the Triple Win Podcast. I'm joined by my friend and regular in our Triple Win Podcast and our community events, regular contributor, Tony Cline. Tony, it's good to see you today.
Tony Cline
Good to see you, Andrew. Glad to be on.
Andrew Smallwood
Absolutely, thanks for being here. Thanks for being here excited for this conversation, and for those who are less familiar with Tony, or if this is the first time you're hearing from Tony, I want to give a little bit of an introduction myself, which is, Tony, before he joined the property management industry, if I recall you were in like consulting or like data processing at large Fortune, 500 companies, if I'm not mistaken. Am I remembering that right, Tony?
Tony Cline
Yeah, yeah, I had a tech business. And we did consulting for data workflow and document management for large Fortune 100 companies, military installations. And so we were very into what makes companies run, how to make them run more efficiently, and then how to make companies and different departments be able to work together when they each are sort of into their own kingdom-building and owning data and doing it their way. And so there was a lot of collaboration we had to do between departments.
Andrew Smallwood
So like one of the things I really appreciate about Tony. Thank you for validating that fact. It's like, if I were to put some like venn diagram circles that you often don't see all overlapping, Tony's like kind of at this unique intersection of like, you know, I'm just hearing, that experience of working with large companies at scale and getting people to work effectively together, right? Combined with your property management. You opened your own real estate brokerage and property management company and business that you've built, and ultimately, you know, successfully sold and operated at different sizes and scales in the property management business, followed by like finding somebody who I like saying, like Tony's a very heart-centered leader, and a very like people-centric kind of person. And so it'd be easy to think about the analytical, and working with Fortune 500, Fortune 100 companies, and the systems thinking alongside the really relevant property management experience alongside, just I think, somebody I really respect and admire for his thoughts on leadership development and his focus on not just challenging himself, but really getting the best, and like coaching others to get the most out of themselves, and to see all those kind of like overlap in the way they do is kind of the uniqueness of what I experience meeting and learning more and more from Tony Cline. And so my hope is that if you're eavesdropping on our conversation today that you can find that kind of same appreciation that I have with Tony today, and we'll share ways. I guess maybe I'll even just do it right off the bat, Tony, for people who aren't familiar with you and like PM Success, could you share just a little bit about that, exactly what you're doing now, and if people wanted to learn more about that where they could find that before we dig in.
Tony Cline
Sure, absolutely. Yeah. And to avoid making it a commercial, I will just tell you that I spent a lot of time in the property management space. For 25 years I was an operator in the property management space. And for the last several years I've been coaching other property management entrepreneurs in being the best they can be and building the best team they can be. So we have a formula we call the championship formula that just helps you elevate every aspect of the business. And there's seven core components that we walk people through. But the reason that it's important is, you mentioned something when you were doing my introduction about being at this crux of this venn diagram. One of the things I learned about putting those systems in place at those big companies is systems are designed by people for people. And there's a lot of control. And so people need to have buy-in in what's being done. So it's really the systems don't work unless the people working the systems work.
And they all have to have this common buy-in. They don't all have to like each other always. I mean, that's always a plus. But it's always about getting people to buy into the same vision of what we're doing, why we're doing it, and what's possible. And then, at the end of the day, you can have your disagreement. You can have your differences in philosophy. But at the end of the day, whatever we decide on, that's what we've decided. And now we all need to support it, whether it was our first choice or not. And so really focusing on the people aspect of it is something that I think leads to the success with everything else. And so I've leveraged my background pre-property management and property management to help other property managers, entrepreneurs just achieve at a super high level.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah. And I think people listening to this already, if I can add a fourth one, is just like Tony is a great communicator, right? And I always feel like I leave with a higher sense of clarity and a deeper understanding, which probably already people are starting to feel that now, that that's coming. So, Tony, I'm excited to dig into this and what we're here to talk about. At your company, you've got a core value that includes the word courage in it, and I'm wondering if you could say a little bit more about that core value and what led you to include that in your company's core values and say, this is important to us.
Tony Cline
One of the things that I've discovered by working with the different property management companies, and over the years I've probably worked with a couple hundred different property management companies, in addition to the presentations that I've done on stage, and being as part of NARPM National, presenting there, being the president of local chapters, that kind of thing, one of the things that I've learned is that at every stage in a business, when you're trying to lead at a high level, you're doing something you've never done before. You may be in a situation similar to something you've done before, but when you try to expand that, when you try to be better than you have been, you're going to have to step outside of what I'll call your comfort zone. I'm not talking about getting out of our comfort zone, but between being in your comfort zone and out of your comfort zone, there is this thin layer, what I'll call your discomfort zone. And it's at the edge of your comfort zone. It's what you believe you can do, believe what's possible, but at the same time it's uncomfortable.
And a lot of people that I talk to when you really start having those intimate conversations about what's holding them back, a lot of it is, it's the fear of the unknown and the fear of looking and being exposed. And so you have this, you don't want to be seen as an imposter. So a lot of people, most people that are trying to achieve in something they've never done before suffer from some level of imposter syndrome.
And so one of the things that I want to do is I want to own that. I want to own the fact that when I'm doing something different, when I'm stretching beyond my current capabilities, I want to own that imposter syndrome, and I want to counter that with the fact that one of our core values is to be courageous.
And there's a difference between courage and bravery. Bravery is to charge into battle, so to speak, without being afraid. And it's, you've done it so many times you're just, “I'm gonna go. I'm going to do things that other people think might be impossible. But I've developed such a thick skin around it that it just is what I do.”
Courage is actually something different. Courage is to feel all of those same fears, but to do it anyway, to intentionally do something that is going to make you uncomfortable, that has the opportunity for failure, to maybe have egg on your face, but to have the courage to do it anyway, because it's the right thing to do.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah, I like this distinction between bravery and courage you just laid out there, and where you started that growing and expanding our capacity, right, that courage is a path to that, right? A way of getting there and putting ourselves in situations where, when we meet those moments with courage, it can allow us to expand right and build confidence that way. You know, it's interesting. When I think about the core values at Second Nature, one of them, Tony, is “massive growth takes massive growth,” and the idea is, for Second Nature to grow, and to do the things we aspire to do, that each individual at Second Nature to the degree we're challenging ourselves and learning and expanding our own capacity, that's going to expand the collective capacity of what we can do together.
I think the question I would have is, next, what is it about this moment in time, where we are today, that you think, is courage more important today than it was a few years ago in the property management industry? Is it the same? What's your take on where we are and the importance of this in the context we're in?
Tony Cline
I heard a presentation about six or seven years ago, and in that presentation—I don't remember the exact details. I wish I did, because I'd like to give a little bit more context to this. But the presenter said, “we have passed the tipping point of the human brain being able to comprehend the speed of change.”
We're in an environment, and that was seven years ago. Think about what's happened in the last seven years. You know, the word Covid became commonplace. AI became more commonplace.
And so in the last seven years things have drastically changed just from there. I often speak about something called Moore's law. And for those that aren't familiar with Moore's law, it basically says that the amount of processing power on a computer chip doubles every 18 months. So in theory, what becomes possible doubles every 18 months.
So think about that. You're at zero. Then that becomes 100%. Then that becomes 200, 400, 800, 1,600 3,200% of what's possible. And so we're in this environment where we're changing at such a rapid pace that it's no longer good enough to look around your marketplace and see what's happening in your marketplace, or see what's happening in your industry.
You can't look at your competitors and say, Well, they're doing that. I'll tweak it a little bit, and I will offer a different solution by ,instead of doing annual inspections, we'll do semi-annual inspections. We are beyond that sort of tweaking with business, and it's not just our business. It's every business, and they're all colliding. All of this change in technology and legislation and consumer demands.
You know Domino's, I don't know if they still do it, because I don't order from Domino's, but at one point they had a program where you could order a pizza by texting an emoji. And if your account was set up, whatever emoji you texted in represented what pizza you're going to get, and then you could follow along where it is in the process, and all of that. That bleeds into the property management space. If I have that kind of access to what's being done, and I have that kind of access to being able to see on the inside, I'm going to expect that everywhere, you know. It's the Amazon effect I can order— before we hopped on here. I ordered a phone charger with a battery, and I'm going to have it before the end of the day.
That type of expectation is bleeding into everywhere.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah, I appreciate this. The rate of change around us feels like it's been accelerating, right? And I think there's a lot of objective markers we could point to, and you pointed to a few of them that really support that statement or belief.
And I'll remember one of our, I think, somebody we mutually admire, Jeff Hoffman once said, if the rate of change outside of your business exceeds the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business, and that's a matter of time.
And so how can we improve our ability to adapt to change, right? And I see courage kind of connecting to that, because it's ultimately stepping up to that moment and kind of meeting those moments to increase our ability to adapt to and ultimately exceed the rate of change around us and the complexities forming around us. And the second thing is, you were talking about Moore's law, and there is like, related to compute. But with AI, it's like there's innovation, not just at the hardware layer, but also the software layer. And it's really this compounding thing kind of all working together. And the rate of change seems like it's accelerating at a pace that's just really, really impressive and also challenging at the same time, and then, of course, something close to Second Nature, you mentioned the Domino’s. And we talk a lot about how the experiences people are having outside of the home, or outside of their rental experience, inform their expectations for what they're going to have for their experiences inside the home or within their rental experience.
And so how can we pay attention to what's happening in commerce and what's happening in consumer experience all over the place and understand how we can bring those lessons and ultimately innovate in the rental experience world to meet those increasing customer demands over time.
Tony Cline
Before I answer that, I want to give a little bit of context. So what you had mentioned about the Moore's law computer chip plus AI, what gets built today builds what gets built tomorrow. And so it's, just we're going to continue to accelerate to the point where it can feel safer to not do anything, because whatever I do, if it's wrong, well, it's wrong, plus if I do something, something better will be here tomorrow. So why don't I just wait for tomorrow and implement that? And then tomorrow comes along and you hear about what's coming next. And so you can constantly be in this position where no action feels better than action.
But I think that's a huge mistake because, as you mentioned, if change outside our businesses is happening faster than change inside our business, we're out of business. I 100% agree with that. So what we need to look at is, as we're looking at commerce and things that are happening outside, we’ve got to really drill down into identifying what our clients really want.
And the only way to know that is to really get focused on who our client is, who we're trying to serve. And I don't want to sound preachy, because this is actually what I do in my coaching program. And again, I don't want to make this sound like a commercial, but if you're a business owner and you're still stuck in the day to day, and you're doing a lot of the tasks, and you're being the expert with a bunch of minions versus the conductor that's kind of running the orchestra, you will not have time to set aside two or three hours a day, or a week, or anything, to say, what should the future look like? And what am I going to try to incorporate into our business?
And it's going to take the person who does that intentionally, and they're the ones that are going to dominate the marketplace, because I'm going to get really, really clear on who my target client profile is.
And the reason I use that—I know there's a lot of terms floating around—but I use the target client profile because I'm going to look at the center of the bullseye of who I want to serve. And I'm going to craft my offerings around that, because now I can get really clear on what their pain points are, and once I know what their pain points are, I know what to say, I know what to offer, I know what my services should be to solve those pain points.
And then you and I have been on a podcast previously where we talked about the reticular activating system, and, you know, the 11 million bits of information that come through every second, and our brain filters out 40 to 50. They can only process 40 or 50 bits of information, and it's things that have already been predetermined to make it through their filter.
So getting really clear on who we want to serve, what their pain points are, and then, being just like a dog on a bone solving those problems for them. That's what will help us stand out.
Andrew Smallwood
Tony, what advice do you give to folks when I think about being in the context of property management, there's an incredible rate of change and things happening on the technology side. Right? There's a rate of change of just what's happening in general in the business world and in commerce and how consumers are interacting with providers. There's a change in legislation and regulation that people are trying to pay attention to and keep up with. And I hear your advice of, okay, if you're in the tactical fully yourself, and you're not able to elevate to a certain level and look at the focus we're bringing to our business, here's how I can work on the business versus in the business, you know that all sounds right to me. And still, even for people who have started to do that and are committed to doing that, it feels like there's a lot going on. And so what advice do you give to people of okay, where do you focus? Where do you start? Or maybe an example to kind of bring to life, if it's with the target customer profile or something else, how are you encouraging people to get into a space where they can focus and know they're being effective in that, oh, I'm not playing whack-a-mole over and over again, to your point?
Tony Cline
Sure. So I have a lot of great friends in the industry that own software companies.
And so hopefully, they don't get too offended by me saying this. I think there are a lot of great softwares out there, but people see other things happening around them and they think, “Wow! That's really shiny,” or, “That's a neat feature,” or whatever. And I would go back to, what problem is it that you're trying to solve?
So you either are solving a problem or taking advantage of an opportunity. And if it's not a solid enough problem or not a solid enough opportunity, then you're chasing the wrong things.
I know that there are people that are on one property management software that hear about a new up and coming software. And they think if I just switch softwares, it will solve all my problems. And that pulls them back into the weeds, and they ultimately trade one software for another, and they get stuck in, “Now this software does something different, but it still has things.” There is no perfect software.
So it's not so much focusing on what tools I need to bring in when. It's really focusing on, what do I think the future looks like from what my clients need?
And again, I'm going to go back to that target client profile because we're going to attract people into our system. But once they come through the front doors and they experience our environment, what does it look like? Does it support–
You know, we've all been to a movie where we saw a movie trailer, and we bought the ticket, and we show up and the movie is nothing like what we thought it was going to be like, based on the trailer. And that's kind of the sales side of it. So when they come into our environment, have we built out that environment that supports the type of people that we are trying to attract?
And then are we properly building our income and revenue stream around the types of services that those people want?
You know, I heard something one of my old mentors used to say, “Find out what people want, and stop giving it to them.” And I thought that was kind of weird. I'm like, what do you mean? Find out what they want and stop giving it to them. He said, “Find out what they want, and they will pay you for it.”
So getting really clear about, you know, you still need to deliver what they want. But you don't have to do it for free. And so the way you slice your pricing, because we all are trying to make a fair wage. We want to be able to cover our expenses and make a modest profit. Our clients want us to be able to do that, otherwise they’ve got to go find somebody else if we go out of business.
So it's really aligning our business model and our business pricing with the needs and desires of our clients.
Andrew Smallwood
Tony, is it your perspective, talking opinions for just a moment, is it your perspective that there's going to be a dominant kind of view in the market? When you look at the property management kind of market, hey, there's a right answer, maybe not for 100%, but for a lot. Or do you think there's a lot of fragmentation of just what are the different problems that property owners, residents, etc, need to be solved? And I'm just curious how you see that landscape of, how many right answers are out there from where you sit, and talking to so many people, and having all the experience you do yourself.
Tony Cline
What I love about this question is, I would have answered it differently probably ten years ago. Ten years ago it was preached that, you know there's a few right ways to do it, and everybody sort of does it the same. We have our leasing fee hopefully. Hopefully everybody's coming around to that by now. We have our leasing fee, a management fee, maybe a setup fee. And then it's just sort of that's how you structure things. And then you provide whatever services you provide under that whole umbrella.
I actually think that, you know I say this all the time, but from a consumer standpoint, property managers are all the same. They don't know. Until they know a property manager and how that property manager has failed them, they don't know that we are different. So from a consumer standpoint, we're all the same. So if we're all the same, why would I pay more for this person than this person, because they're offering me the “same services” for cheaper.
And so what I love about what's happening now is, it's sort of like we went from… I'm trying to… It's almost like we went from Taco Bell to Chipotle. Like Taco Bell, you had a couple of items on the menu and you picked it. Maybe you don't like tomatoes, so you hold the tomatoes, and if they want to do that for you, they do. Sometimes Taco Bell does what they want, so who knows. But you know, Chipotle, you kind of walk up to the counter, and they say, well, what is it that you want?
And then they let you pick and choose the services that you have to offer. And I think to get out from being “we're all the same” to “here is my message, here is who I'm perfect for, and if you resonate with that, I'm your perfect company,” then that opens up the opportunity. So in my mind, over the next two or three years, you're going to see a lot more choices offered, and they may be choices that were already offered at some level in the past. But our ability to market those and create a differentiation around those, I think is going to continue to increase to the point where we may even have different segments of what we call property management in the future.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah, that's interesting. That's interesting.
Tony, I'll ask one more thing, kind of on this before taking us a little different direction. But if I go back to, again, okay, prioritizing, let me get focused on the problem that I solve. How can I align my marketing, my business operations, my business model, right? And the more aligned I can get that, I can start to see some momentum coming out of that focus and not get distracted by too many opportunities or too many other ways, and see ultimately, if my—I'll get the feedback from the market—if my strategy is working.
There's still just a lot of overwhelm that takes place, even just making that change. Even if you can get yourself focused and clear. What advice do you give people who are, you know, in a state of overwhelm, of how they can overcome that and bring the courage to move things forward in the direction that they're on?
Tony Cline
When I first got started in this business, it used to really give me a lot of stress at the end of the day to not have everything done, and if you can get everything on your task list done, and come in with a clean slate tomorrow, by all means do that, and I'm envious of you.
But what I learned was, there will always be more in your day to get done than there is day to get it done with.
And so you need to focus on doing the activities that will move the ball furthest down the field. Do the things that have the highest impact and then be comfortable with the fact that there are still things that you could have done, or possibly even should have done, but that just have to be put off ‘til tomorrow, and then it's okay to shut your brain off.
I'm not saying it's always possible. But I'm saying it's always okay to shut it off, relax, rejuvenate, and then come back the next day and attack it.
So that's the first thing. The second thing I would say is, we're in a state of just the world. I don't know if it'll ever go backwards, but we are in a state where we have to become comfortable being uncomfortable, and I know that sounds weird. But in order to be an entrepreneur, that's kind of what we signed up for, is to do things that either haven't been done before, or that we think we can do better. Because if we're not in one of those two camps, why not go get a job where you can have really good benefits and have somebody else dealing with the high picture things, and then you just clock in, clock out, and go home.
There's a reason that we decided we wanted to be in this world, and it is because we wanted to make a difference and do the things that we wanted to do. And a lot of that we've never done before. So it's okay if you feel that feeling of being uncomfortable and leaning into it and leveraging that to say, if I'm feeling that I'm probably doing the right things.
Andrew Smallwood
Hmm, okay. What you've got me curious about next is, when I think about core values and courage, tight? Like, I think you've made it clear what this is, what what it feels like when it matters, why it matters right now… what are some of the practical habits, routines, rhythms, things that would help if I'm trying to remember and ultimately show up to more moments with courage and help the people in my team and organization do that more in an effective way? How might I go about doing that?
Tony Cline
Okay. So the overarching theme for this podcast is leadership. And so if you think about that, everything that we just talked about from the entrepreneurial standpoint, our team is probably also feeling that. But the difference is, you know where you want the business to go, or you at least know what it takes for it to survive.
And your team doesn't know that. And so there's a study, and again, I wish I remembered more details about some of this stuff, but there's a study about rats. And they had a study where they put rats in water, and they saw how long it took them to drown. And I don't remember the exact details, but it was a matter of minutes, we'll say, or a few hours.
Then they did the same study where they took new rats—because those ones are dead—but they took new rats, put them in water, and right before they were about to give up, they could tell when they were about to go under, they would take them out and then let them rest, and then put them back in.
And those rats lasted like I don't know 8 or 10 times the amount of time, because they had hope of what was going to happen in the future.
And that's a really weird study. Sorry I referenced it without all the details. But the point is, people will suffer through, they will hang on, they will keep working towards something if they perceive that there's a positive outcome at the end of it.
And so from a leadership standpoint for our team it's so important to basically, and I know there are people out there that don't get into the touchy-feely thing. You brought it up in the beginning of my intro that I'm a people-focused leader.
I think it's really important to become the head cheerleader for your company and to overcommunicate those mission, vision, core values that we've been talking about. But the vision is so important to say, this is what we're doing. This is what we're building. This is where we're growing to. This is the impact we're going to have in the community and to give people something to buy into and to believe in. And I think that is how you don't just create good followers, but other good leaders in the company, because now they know where they're leading and they can help you lead the rest of the team in that direction.
Andrew Smallwood
In the organizations you've been in, Tony, and the ones that you're coaching with now, where are kind of the natural opportunities where bringing that vision into the organization happens on a regular basis? Or what are the kinds of moments where it would be natural—natural or unnatural, but effective—to to bring it up.
Tony Cline
Yeah, I don't know if you've ever joined like a new bowling team or a new group of people that are kind of already connected. They kind of already have their inside jokes. Maybe this weird handshake, or they do fist bump instead of handshake, or whatever, those things become normal to that group. But when somebody sees that for the first time, it's kind of odd. It's kind of unusual. And so it's the same thing with what I'm about to talk about. So what we do with our teams, a lot of our companies that we coach with work on an EOS-like platform.
EOS, I think, for some of the business sizes that we deal with in the smaller property management firms, EOS is a little bit overkill, so we kind of do some adjustments, but we stay true to a few things. We have our daily huddle, and then we have a weekly meeting, and the weekly meeting we go over KPIs and scorecards.
But in the daily huddle we try to recognize an opportunity to share an example of how we demonstrated the core values or a core value that day, or where we missed an opportunity, because a lot of times when you say, “Hey, share how we held up our core values,” people are like, “I don't really know.” But if you flip that on its head, you say, “Okay, here are our core values. Where did we miss an opportunity to display those?”
They can find examples, and it's still teaching either way, and eventually they will be able to start recognizing that. So I think it's really clear to talk about that every day in the beginning, and then you can kind of move it to, okay, we're going to move that to our weekly meeting. But in the weekly meeting we want to be able to share what progress we made around that. But then, again, the leader of the team or a leader of the team needs to be sharing how we moved closer to the vision that we have for the company.
And again, it's just building that storyline, you know? If you watch any good movie they have foreshadowed what's to come. And sometimes the hero makes the journey and has good success, and sometimes they encounter another challenge on the way. But sometimes those are the best movies where you've overcome some challenge, you know where you're going, and then you're able to continue forward. And so I think it's really important to do that.
And then, lastly, our quarterly planning sessions where we get the team together, and we review our quarterly projects, and we talk about what progress we've made over the last quarter.
And again depending on the size of the company. You know, EOS recommends a certain amount of time to do these things. I say it's your company if you can accomplish the same goals in less time then do it. But it's really communicating, reminding them of the mission, getting them to buy in. And then the vision of where we're headed. And I think that is a really good cadence for people to get started with.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah, thanks for sharing that. And I imagine if somebody hasn't done this before, that first time you're bringing this to your team, it's going to be a moment where you're bringing some courage. And you're wondering how's the team going to react to this, how are they going to respond to this? And trying to say, hey, here's the why behind, we want to change this conversation that we're having. Here's why we want to introduce this and get more of that buy-in and ultimately get people bought into, here's the exciting future that we're creating together, that's going to pull us through some challenges that we can anticipate, and some that we can't anticipate, and we'll have to tackle them when they come up. But engaging folks in that, and not underestimating the initial repetition that it takes to do that. Not just saying it once and then, like 90 days from now or a year from now we'll look at these core values or this vision again. Really, really communicating that clearly and consistently and compellingly to get people clear on it.
Appreciate how you, how you talked about that of doing it daily and then integrating it weekly so that it's part of the rhythm, and people are continually engaged with it.
Tony Cline
Andrew, one thing I want to add on to that is, where we've seen the most success is with folks that draw a line in the sand, and they create a moment in time where they can memorialize the beginning of the transformation or transition to something else. So we talk a lot in our company about the championship formula and building championship teams. And oftentimes when we work with a company, we'll create some new logo or some new saying or something that is the line in the sand where that's the old company. That's how we used to do things.
Moving forward, here's the vision. Here's the mission. We are 100% loyal to that, not necessarily to any one team member. So if the team members are on board with the mission,. then they have our loyalty. So we are going to at all costs achieve this together as a team for the people who believe in it and buy into it, and we're going to make it possible for everybody to be successful in doing that. So having some sort of mental marker at the beginning of this process that we can measure back to, because if we've been in business for six or seven years it's hard to say, well, when did we actually start this transition? And when did we step up and “put on a different uniform” to be a different team?
If we don't mark that, it's really easy for that just to blend into the past. And so by having that marker, that sets the path forward for us to say, this is when we became the new thing. We've yet to achieve it, but that's when we became, it was when we made that commitment to do so.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah. Somebody might say, like, logo, or some of these changes, is that a distraction from getting to work? But having that visual cue and something just definitive of, together we're going to change, and here's where we're going, it can… I can see how that can help people recognize, this is a moment where we're making a change, right? And we're making a commitment together.
Tony Cline
Yeah. And I'm not necessarily saying, change the logo of the company, anything like that, it's just more of some project thing that gets us started in the right direction.
Andrew Smallwood
That's right. That's right.
Tony. I really appreciated this conversation. I'd love to, is there something we didn't talk about that you think is important for people to know or think about as it relates to this topic before we sign off?
Tony Cline
Yeah, I think something that we touched on, but I really want to emphasize, is all of the uncertainty we feel as leaders, everybody else on our team is feeling that same thing. And so every time some new software gets introduced, every time a new legislative requirement comes down, every time we say we're going to change this policy or process, or whatever, they have that same anxiety and uncertainty.
And people are lonelier now. There, I mean, there's studies. There's all kinds of scientific proof about this. People are lonelier now than they've ever been.
And so giving people something to buy into and believe in and you promote it, you need to promote where you're going to the point where people you think people are tired of hearing it, because you're probably about 30% of the way there. You've scratched the surface in communicating where we're going.
And if you give people something to latch onto, something to believe in, even if it means more work, it generally means less anxiety, because they at least know where they're going and what they're doing and where the company's going. And so just remember that a lot of the things you feel, you are in leadership positions for a reason, you have great responsibility to lead those. It's not a title that you get to wear as some sort of badge. It's a heavy responsibility that you have to actually lead the people who have been trusted in your care.
Andrew Smallwood
I'm really glad you added that. And I hope that people listening to this, and if you've made it this far, I'm hoping you're feeling a little bit of how I'm feeling after this conversation, which is, I'm feeling encouraged. I'm feeling empowered, a little bit more clear. I feel like I've got some good ideas and a little inspiration to think about this and apply this after the conversation. So, Tony, I just want to say thank you again. Thanks for making the time. Always a pleasure.
Tony Cline
Thanks, Andrew, take care.