Interview with David Crane, CEO of Winning Appliances on the topic of leadership and achieving success in life and business.
David has been group Chief Executive Officer of Winning Appliances for the past two and a half years and has overseen a transformation of their retail business which has repositioned Winning Appliances to have the most inspiring appliance stores in Australia significantly outperforming the market. Prior to working at Winning Appliances, David worked as VP of International Sales for La-Z-Boy and in a Sales VP role for Natuzzi.
In this interview, David candidly shares strategies that have helped him achieve amazing career success and to build aligned and motivated teams with the capability to outperform in any marketplace. Starting in an entry level position in a factory sweeping floors, David worked his way to the top through working hard and working smart and differentiating himself from the competition.
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Interview Transcript
David has been the Group Chief Executive Officer of Winning Appliances for the past two and a half years and he’s really overseen a transformation of their retail business which has repositioned Winning Appliances in the market, that have amongst some of the most inspiring appliance stores in Australia. If you haven’t been there, believe me you have to go and take a look. David also has a very interesting career where he’s worked for other organisations internationally, such as La-Z-Boy and Natuzzi. So, I’m really excited to have David with us today. Welcome David.
David: Thank you, Jeremy. Thanks for the opportunity.
Jeremy: I guess if we could start out, could you tell me a little bit about how you started in business?
David: Well, I took a very unconventional route, I can say that. I moved to America from Canada and previous to Canada I was in the UK. Growing up, following my family as my dad was very entrepreneurial, he had all sorts of wonderful ideas which took him from one place to the next. From Canada to America, my schooling gave me an opportunity to graduate a little bit earlier than you do when you are in traditional American schools. Certainly, it wasn’t because I was smarter than anyone else, it was just the way those credits are actually transferred from one country and one school to the next. So, I graduated after I turned 16 from high school in the United States, and I had this opportunity to go and sweep the floors in a furniture company in Mexico, and I never went to University. My father was CEO of a furniture company in Mexico and they offered me a job for $15,000 a year and I thought I absolutely hit a lottery. I thought I’d rather make money than go spend it, much to my mother’s dismay. I can tell you she actually wanted me to travel Europe and see the world. She said, “you might fall in love in Paris and never come home or you might be a waiter in Monaco and think this is it for me”. And as I look back alone on that thinking; who in the world would say that to a 16 year old let alone a very immature 16 year old? I’m still amazed to this day that my mother would say such a thing, but in saying all of that, I took an unconventional route of saying I am gonna go and make money.
Now my dad told me one thing, he said “people are going to talk”. He said “they are going to tell you that you are the boss’s son and the only reason you got the job was because of me so you’ve got to put all that behind you and you have got to absolutely out-hustle your competition. You’ve got to make your own mark in this goal and in this job otherwise you are going to be forgotten and left behind”. And so from a very young age, I took that as my opportunity and I have never looked back.
So I started sweeping the floors. I would spend my summers in Italy making leather and I was in a leather furniture factory. I worked my way through cutting wood to the phone facility to becoming a real expert on what I knew from the ground up and by the time I was 19 I had moved to New York to sell leather and I’ve been all over the United States to sell more and then next thing you know there’s people calling me because they’ve heard of my name.
Jeremy: So, was that the call that led you to Natuzzi?
David: You know it’s funny, my grandfather always told me one thing and it’s always stayed with me. He said, “David, you close the doors, don’t close the doors in front of you. Whatever opportunity comes your way, just take it, you can always come home, you will always be alright, just take it”. So, from selling leather furniture for a family business, traveling around the country, it was there that Natuzzi heard of me and in fact it was one of the largest department stores in America called Dillards based out of Fort Worth, Texas. I sold Dillards when I worked for the family leather furniture company which at the time had the name Leather Trend. I worked for them. I sold Dillard’s Leather Trend furniture, they got to know me and then over the years I had moved on to different states to do different things and so when Natuzzi was looking for a new representative to work for them, Dillards were the actual ones who said “I don’t care who you interview, go find David Crane” and so at that point Natuzzi came to me and it was funny how that reputation of just out-hustling your competition stayed with me since I was 16.
At this point, I’m thinking I would have been somewhere around 26-27, I had 10 years of experience, I knew the product like the back of my hand, I knew leather like the back of my hand, I knew the industry like the back of my hand, and I was very much in an industry of people somewhat twice my age. So, I was a little bit unique in that regard and I knew what I was talking about. I was a lot younger than everybody else. And I absolutely continued to hustle so Natuzzi heard of me, found me and from there, Jeremy, was a quick progression. I spent six months as their sales representative in the state of Texas. I then was given the opportunity to become the vice president of sales for the south region so that gave me the ability to get into management. It gave me the ability to lead and work very closely with a lot of sales reps who were my peers and they now reported to me and it gave me the chance to spread my wings, and get out of just one state, one town; Mexico, Central America, South America, other parts of the United States, the Caribbean -everything opened up to me. And all of a sudden I had somewhat an international cache around me and it gave me the chance to continue to learn but it was because my first management role was with who I considered my peers that gave me a very unique style which I still use today, which is you lead from within. We are friends with everybody. There is no heirachy in our organisation. Everybody knows what titles are on what card but we are not paying much attention to that. It is simply about how do we make sure everybody gets the feeling that I am accessible at any time, we work closely together, and we have a lot of fun doing it. We have a great rapport, great friendship, but most importantly we do a lot of business together and we all point ourselves in the right direction.
Jeremy: I love that point you made about hustling and that’s what you have to do, but the question for me comes back to the why, what was your why that drove you to want to succeed and move ahead in your career?
David: I often think about that. I ran into a gentleman many years ago who was the senior sales executive for La-Z-Boy and he loved to hire athletes. He said athletes have got a frame of mind that is unique, he said they don’t like to lose. They have this competitive nature within them and the funny thing is that if I look back on my sports growing up, I did play soccer, I played for the national team at the young age and travelled the world kicking around a ball. I couldn’t make a living, mind you, but I certainly enjoyed it. And then you get to a certain age when you, if you are not under contract at that point in time, your opportunity is passed.
So, if I look at the coaches and the team mates and the dedication it took from an athletic stand point, to train five days a week to be at the peak of your fitness, even though you are young and you are still growing and there’s all sorts happenening. It was one of those things that stays with me that I am very much that person today just sometimes in a suit, I guess, is the easiest way to say it. That hunger to win the ball, that hunger to get the goal, that desire to win, it’s no different in business for me. I don’t like to lose; we are not in the business of losing. We want to compete. We sometimes win, we sometimes lose, but you’ve got to learn from them, you’ve got to move forward. It’s not a single sport, business is a team event. You’ve got to bring everybody along for the ride so you’ve got to be able to coach and play at the same time.
Jeremy: Wonderful, so if you were giving some advice to someone who was at a little bit of an earlier stage in their career than you, and they said “David, how is that I can hustle? What do I need to do to really move ahead?”, what will your advice be to them?
David: Well, first, I am humbled that someone would actually come to that I would be able to give that advice. I speak from a very unique perspective that I didn’t take the conventional route as I have highlighted, so my feedback would simply be: you’ve got to know what you are selling or what your role is within the organisation to the Nth degree. It’s your responsibility to make sure that, if you are selling a products, and today I have retail stores in Australia from where we sell appliances, so from my sale experts on the floor, if they don’t know everything about every product, then it’s my responsibility to give you those tools. And if you can’t do it then it’s probably not the right fit for you.
Because we need to be better than everybody else, I need to make sure that if we are selling an appliance or whether we are selling widgets, if you don’t know everything about that particular product and if you don’t know what your point of difference is to make sure why should a customer buy from me versus somebody else, then we’ve already lost half the fight. So, for me, know what you are selling, give yourself the ability to have all of those tools in your bag, so when the question pops up, you know exactly how you are going to answer it. And most importantly back to the basics for me is how to hustle your competition. There’s people out there doing the exact same thing and how are you going to be that point of difference? For me it was quite easy, in the fact that I will just see so much more that everybody else, whether it be Saturday morning, Sunday morning, in stores selling, talking, communicating, having that fun with everybody, everybody knew who I was, plus I have a really funny accent in America, so I sold out a little bit more.
Jeremy: So that has been an interesting role for you at the Winning Group and it must be interesting when you are brought into an organisation almost as an outsider to when you have a vision of what you have to do in transforming the company actually enrolling other people to get onboard. How did you go about that?
David: It’s certainly a process and not always an easy one and it certainly hasn’t been easy for us as we’ve been through this. When I came into the business we were in the process of building what is now our flagship showroom here in Sydney and I inherited this piece of land where the walls were going up and all sorts were happening around me and I didn’t quite understand what was happening and I walk to the existing store which had been around for these years and as I walked around and talked to the people and looked at the products and looked at the displays. It was a retail store that was somewhat like Aladdin’s den. You went up some stairs, you went around the corner, you went down some stairs, “ooh, look a fridge”, and you went left and right, “oh, there’s a washing machine”, and there was no real rhyme or reason to it. It seemed to flow, but we seemed to be everybody’s best kept secret. Everybody loved to shop at Winning Appliances. They said we are sort of off the beaten track by one street, we were never on the main street where the rent was the highest. We are always a street back. You got this wonderful advice and they have some great brands and they’d always take good care of you, but for me I thought, “let’s just look at best practice around the world”, and so I was fortunate enough when John Winning and I took the time to travel around from New York to London to Asia.
We went around and looked at retail, we went from watch stores to socks stores, to you know department stores, big box stores. We went and looked and listened and learned and met with some really great great companies out there, and what it did was, we came back and we said we’ve got to create an experience, we’ve got to create a little bit of theatre around selling a product which traditionally isn’t very sexy to shop for. I mean at the end of the day, we sell whitegoods. Whatever it is, metal boxes, what might be a microwave metal box or what might keep your fruit and veg cold but you know they are simply metal boxes. We wanted to put a bit of theatre around it so I said we can’t do that and call ourselves a specialist retailer with theatre and a bit of pizzaz if we are going to go into Aladdin’s den so let’s open things up a little bit and what we did is we opened up the store, we made everything by brand and so instead of a laundry isle which is traditional in our retail space, our competitors still do it this way, when you walk into a laundry section, there are hundreds of laundry items lined up like soldiers and I call them soldier areas. Stack them deep, sell them cheap and said, here we go, we walk from one to the next to the next to the next and then it became…
Jeremy: It’s a tiring shopping experience that way.
David: Listen, don’t want to say too much because my competitors, some of them are much bigger than I am, and if they get wind that this is the way to do it and we are having success then they might come after me, so what I will say is ultimately, it’s a tiring experience, you are right, and it is monotonous and what I found is when a customer walks in and he just see one item to the next and to the next, it becomes about price, they walk themselves down the ladder to the lowest common denominator and maybe they stop themselves at the one that’s not exactly the cheapest, but certainly not the most expensive and it becomes about price.
When you put things the way we saw it as a bit of theatre you are greeted when you walk into our store, you are offered coffee, you are offered a hand-crafted coffee from a beautiful coffee machine and you know, slow down a little bit, spend some time with us, have a glass of water, walk, listen, talk to us, learn about the brands and be inspired by the results that they can provide you. It became about the brand, when you incorporate the brand and talk about the beauty and the features that particular company provides, price hasn’t even come to the equation yet, it ends up being more of a profitable sale and becomes more about the aspirational aspects of an item and our success to that was, getting the family to believe that this was the right thing to do.
Behind Winning Appliances is a wonderful family business of a 109 years old, fourth generation, Australian-owned and I can tell you it was not easy. At the same time I said if we are going to do this and we are going to change the interior then let’s change the exterior and change the brand, so we rebranded the 109 year old which was maybe the hardest thing that I’ve ever done. The family said they understood the desire to evolve. They appreciate the drive and the fact that we can’t do the same thing over and over again, let’s just push the envelope a little bit and do something different than our competitors. So the family finally said to me you can do it with this one store but the others stay the same. If you have success with this one store then we’ll convert the rest and that’s all I needed. I said thank you very much. We were able to create this wonderful experience in the store, the brands stood out, my only brief to the brands that are in the flagship showroom was this; do something that you’ve never done before, and wow me, because if you can’t wow me then you are not going to be able to wow my customers.
We sent all these drawings backwards and forwards in regards to the designs of their displays, how it’s going to look, and how it was going to interact with the customer. Finally, we have a store which I am very proud to say is now two years old, when I took over, even though it was Aladdin’s den, it was already the highest volume store of it’s kind in the country. I am proud to say that it’s grown on average about 24% year on year increase, and it’s given us the ability to have a little bit more free reign with doing the same thing to the rest of our stores and that’s the process we are going through as we speak. Not an easy transition, took a lot of salesmanship with the family, a lot of bringing them along for the ride and selling them, not just telling them, and so it gave them the opportunity to see the direction we are going and, of course, once the results start coming in, their smiles just went bigger and bigger and they said “okay, we believe you now, go for it”.
Jeremy: One of the things that I love and for those of you who haven’t already, make sure you get into Dank Street, Redfern [Sydney] to see the Winning Appliances showroom. It is just so much about the experience and it’s woven the whole story of Winning. It’s not about throwing out the old but about embracing the old and add to it the something new and so it’s an amazing experience, there’s cooking demonstrations….. But it’s actually, what I found more than anything else, is fun and engaging to look around, but something I also noticed was the culture of the people you had working within the stores, David. Did you do much to transform the culture of the people to match the showroom that you had created?
David: I was very fortunate enough that on one side you inherit a project that is going to take up a lot of your time and you are changing so much and you are busy for all sorts of hours. On the other side, I was extremely fortunate that I inherited exceptional people. The sales experts that we have are second to none in the country and we know that because we are told that from our competitors. The uniqueness about our business, Jeremy, is the fact that we don’t pay a commission, where traditionally retailers in our space do pay a commission. You are paid a base and you are then paid a commission based upon what you sell and the culture that creates is a directional sell so when I go into a retail store as a customer I am getting sold very quickly either what they got a lot of in their warehouse or what they have been bonused on that particular month so you get somewhat of a directional sale. In our business the exceptional knowledge of our people gives us the ability to reward them a little bit differently. We pay an above the market wage to every single one of our employees so that when a customer comes into the store they get the opportunity to get someone who is going to listen to them, understand how they cook, understand how they clean, understand what their needs are and then from there as experts we would give them our good, better or best thought process around what they need for their home versus maybe what we’ve got 50 of sitting in our warehouse. So the people were the exception to the rule, they make our business and I didn’t really have to do too much, I can’t take any credit for that to be honest.
Jeremy: So here’s a question for you about leadership and developing leadership within your organisation. How do you see leadership really affecting the overall result for the organisation?
David: Well again, I have to go back to my quote that I use a lot and that’s lead from within. You’ve got to be seen, you can’t be considered in an ivory tower or behind an office door. In fact if anybody ever came to our head office like you, Jeremy, you’ll know we are an open plan. I sit on a chair at the end of a desk….
Jeremy: You have a cube like everyone else
David: Exactly right, we are a plug and play. You can come in, sit down, plug in, I might be sitting on a chair, I might be sitting in a break out room where people play ping pong or I might be sitting on an exercise ball having a conversation with somebody. We’ve got to be accessible and most importantly in the stores everybody needs to know your name. I can walk into any one of my stores right now, I know their children’s name, we hug, we kiss, we say hi, we shake hands, we know who we are, they ask about my weekend, they know my children’s name, my wife’s name, we have a very open communication line with every single one in our business and the beauty of that is there is not a question that doesn’t get answered. You are accessible at any time and people will feel more open with you so you get the good, the bad and the ugly which is always a good thing and I had that this weekend. I had a sales expert questioning a decision I had made and given them the ability to reach out to me and say “I just couldn’t sleep last night because of A, B and C, just needed to share it with you”. And then yesterday, I had the opportunity to talk to them and say “are you alright?”, this is the reason why, give them a little bit of backstory that they maybe didn’t know, but ultimately feel free enough to have that conversation with me, which I don’t think you can put a price on.
Now the negative to this is when you are so accessible, productivity changes, you become productive in the fact that you help the person immediately but when you’ve got a list of something to do for the day, it’s sometimes quite challenging when you are pulled in a hundred different directions before lunch time, and to get done what you thought you needed to get done, but you have to keep in mind that that’s your position, that’s your role and ultimately you’ve helped those hundred people before lunch in a way that you hadn’t planned on and they get an answer to their challenges and at the end of the day if there is a customer waiting or a customer needing an answer, then it is our responsibility to make sure that everyone can get to you as quickly as possible, so that you can give them the tool, if that’s what they need, so they can go back to that customer, because if that customer has a poor experience then those bad words spread faster than good ones.
Jeremy: It’s interesting, without trust people aren’t honest and I think one of the things is also as their leader actually being honest with them and you’ve been focusing on the supportive side I’ve got no doubt you’ve also challenged people to be at their best at times.
David: You know, we’ve got to continue to focus on the fact that we are a business and we are here to sell and if we are not asking for the order, providing the best experience and if that trust you mention isn’t created in the stores, ultimately they are going to choose not to spend their money with you and spend it somewhere else. And so what I believe wholeheartedly is we have done our best to impress every customer and to make sure that we have given them the right experience let them believe that we are the experts. Give them the knowledge they need, not be directionally sold a particular product over another, give them what they now feel comfortable is the right thing for their home, they are going to feel comfortable and they are going to want to give us their money, but let’s not make any mistake, we are here to sell and it’s our job to make sure that we can afford to do all those nice things that I mentioned because if we don’t sell, then the money will not come in, then ultimately I won’t be able to afford to pay an above market rate, and I have to consider commissions. So when my ups are up so are you, and when my downs are down so are you.
At this point I will put it this way, we are fortunate enough to, Jeremy, that it’s been working for us for up to 109 years, our business continues to grow and in our industry for the last three years it has remained flat, it hasn’t grown 1%, yet we’ve had double digit growths every single year based on this mantra and I am happy to say that I am part of that movement with what are like close to 200 sales experts between my 12 stores and I am happy to be part of it.
Jeremy: Well done! So, when you promote someone into a more senior role requiring leadership, what sort of things do you do to help them be more successful in their position?
David: Well, I am not too sure I’m very good at that if am to be completely honest with you. I think you know I only have myself to fall back on. When you don’t have somewhat formal education or the processes behind the MBA that’s given you the actual tools to know how to move from A to B to C to D. You know my way might be a little bit different than what might be the conventional way or the right way, so from my perspective I have to have the instinct and the feeling of the individual, because I trust myself really just as much as I trust my best friend. It’s one of those abilities that if am not comfortable with somebody in a particular role, then I’m just not sure it’s going to happen.
I’m not necessarily looking for someone who has done it before, I’m not looking for someone outside of the industry and done it with other companies and is going to come in and change our world. I prefer to promote from within, I prefer to make sure I can see something that makes me realise that this individual has got what it takes. They might not have all the tools today, but they’ve got that instinct, that ability that’s making my gut feel good, so when I find that individual we go through a process just internally, just getting to know each other on a personal level, just giving me comfort with their style, their ability and moral compass, integrity, all things which are vital to the success of our business and then we go to the education side, what have you done? What do you do? How do you do it? And then help them on a daily basis of coaching from my experience but also being smart enough to listen to them, because my style is somehow unique. If I’m not able to listen to them I’m not going to maybe learn a better way of doing it myself, so, it’s very collaborative and we have to be open to the fact, and I certainly am, that on a daily basis, that I don’t know it all. So what I would say is let me listen, let me understand, let me share with you what I think and we’ll go down a certain path to start with, and maybe that path is 90% me speaking and 10% them, and at least it gets the ball rolling because they come into their role and they are not sure exactly everything they need to do, so let me help point them in the direction. But one of our company values is own your role, and if you see a better way of doing it, then do it and share with me why, and the reason for doing it and if it makes sense I’m going to support you 100% . It’s definitely a unique way, Jeremy, of doing it and I’ll say a few times when you have the background I do, I’m not always the most conventional, but I think the numbers and everything speak for themselves …….
Jeremy: One of the things about convention is that if you do what everybody else does then you get the results that everyone else gets.
David: You are exactly right so maybe it’s not so bad.
Jeremy: You may not have done the formal education, but at an earlier stage in your career I believe that you actually came across one of the Rapport Leadership Training courses, Leadership Breakthrough One.
David: I am proud to say that I’ve been to LB 1 and LB 2 [Leadership Breakthrough One and Leadership Breakthrough Two] and I thoroughly enjoyed both experiences in Nevada at Rapport Leadership International. This was an initiative started by La-Z-Boy. There was a gentleman by the name of Steve Heffley who runs the La-Z-Boy stores in Nevada, he was on Rapport’s very first class and he was so inspired by what he went through that he starting putting [through] his own stores.
At the time he had three La-Z-Boy stores in Las Vegas. He watched his sales just start to grow, he watched his culture just start to grow and next thing you know he’s on a wonderful momentum. It gave him the ability to put all his new hires through the program, he invested in them, they invested in him and it was just a wonderful thing. So Steve was just one of the key people who did it, who provided that experience for La-Z-Boy and I am proud to say that I went through it. I’ve also been ‘on team’ at a different Rapport camp in Texas where they called me up one day and said David “would you go on team?”.
I’ve got to say that I used the words I remember so vividly. It was a Sunday night, I’ve just been through LB1. I am sitting at Las Vegas airport on my way to Texas, I would have been about 25, let’s just say. You know, my parents are very pragmatic sensible people, maybe don’t put themselves out there to try new experiences too much, very stuck in their ways and I love them for it. But what I would say is that my dad said to me “how do you feel?”, and I remember sitting there, with croaky voice with an expression of I am tired and exhausted and I said “I feel like a giant inside” and I’ve never forgotten that. It changed the way I approach everything and I’ve never forgotten it and nor will I ever forget it.
Jeremy: It’s exciting when you realise your potential that lies inside each one of us.
David: I tell you, and you talk about unlocking that potential over just a couple of days. I have often said to friends who I felt would benefit from Rapport and I said “I’ll pay for you to go and if you don’t feel like you have got out of it what you think you should have, then don’t pay me back. But if you feel you got out of it and if you feel it changed the way you look at things, then I’ll gladly accept the cheque back”, but it gives me the ability to also pay it forward a little bit, but most importantly, allow people to see what I’ve seen through that program and course, and the fellowship and friendship its created. I mean look at it, it’s put us in contact, and we’ve been on the other side of the world from each other all our lives and it’s given me the opportunity to speak to you today.
Jeremy: It’s certainly something that, when you understand the DNA of leadership and you understand how to bring forth your own leadership style, it’s really exciting and to be engaged with other people with similar beliefs is a fantastic thing.
David: 100%
Jeremy: If there’s one thing that you still apply from what you learnt from Leadership Breakthrough on a regular basis, what would that be?
David: You know, I will say that I very much… They say in some courses or some books that there is no emotion in business and I call BS on that. There’s absolutely emotion in business because the emotional connection of customers are going to get to buying a particular product over another are somewhat emotional. Sometimes it’s about price, I get that, but a lot the time you are emotionally driven by, maybe, an Italian brand over a German brand. For example, based on an experience you’ve had in Italy some years ago, you know, the connection giving you the desire to buy something over something else.
Whether it will be about just people’s experience in the store, you know when people come in the store and they don’t just have a good experience and they are compelled to write you an email to say how terrible things were, you know they are emotional about something. So, I pick up the phone, I call every single customer who has a problem with their experience and I wish to greet them in the store myself and I help them in any way I can to earn back their loyalty.
Whether it be a comment on social media, whether it be a conversation with a friend at a pub, and something bad has been said about your brand because they didn’t get the right experience, you’ve got to have the ability and desire to want to fix that and I’m also emotional with my team. This might sound funny but there’s always the times when we laugh together. There’s been times when you cry together, and that makes me who I am and I can tell you whole heartedly it’s not pleasurable when you are sometimes sitting with somebody who’s…. I’ll tell you an example, a couple of months ago one of those individuals in our store, not of a high ranking role, she comes in every day and she does an exceptional job for our business. She’s always a bubbly person, her husband had terminal cancer and he passed. When you have to speak to that individual and share with her that you are thinking of her and her family and they can take as much time as they want away from the work place without even worrying about the pay cheque, how dare we think that they’ve got to get pay roll or somebody involved to say they’ve taken this much annual leave or they’ve taken this.
You know, that’s irrelevant they just lost somebody in their lives and we have to rally around them and I can assure you, those are not dry eye conversations. If you are not feeling what they are feeling, then, you are not really on the same page and that happens every single……It happens more than it should, those types of horrific conversations. But you also get the beautiful ones where on Friday night when we buy the first free rounds of drinks at the local pub every Friday night for our employees and on Friday we’ll go down there, we’ll have a couple of drinks with everybody, we are out of work, we are having a chat, we are getting to know one another, you are also laughing, you’ve also have your arms around one another, you know having the cheers before you go home to your family, just having a drink, just laughing and getting to know them a little bit better….you know that emotional level that I experienced in LB1 that had me going through experiences that weekend opened me up to being the leader that I am today in regards to how I interact with my own team. And it doesn’t work for everybody and that’s okay, but it works for us, and it works for me.
Jeremy: Well, when you come from the heart, it’s amazing what you can do, and it sounds like your team members are actually more like family members with the level of care that you have for them, and success is no accident. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time and sharing some of your thoughts with us today. Thank you.
David: Thank you, Jeremy. Thanks for the opportunity and to people who are listening, potentially listening, is ultimately…thanks for giving me the chance to be part of it and I am very proud to say that I am a graduate of LB1, LB2. I’ve still got to get my master grad, I’ve still got to go back and I am looking forward to that and for those who are thinking about it or haven’t been through it just yet, my only encouragement to you is go for it and I promise you, if you get half out of it what I did, you’ll be changed for the better in all aspects of your life and it will be something that will stay with you forever. Jeremy thanks for the opportunity and look forward to seeing you soon.
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