Shownotes
Episode 164 Frederick Dudek (Freddy D)
Company culture alignment is the difference between a team rowing in chaos and a crew gliding to victory. In Episode 164, Matthew Person, founder of Town Square Advisors and author of The Culture of Alignment, breaks down his Square Management System for designing culture with intention instead of copying “best places to work.”
You’ll hear why so many hires fail within 18 months, how misalignment poisons morale and performance, and why there’s no such thing as a bad employee—only a bad fit. Matthew shows leaders how to define identity, instruction, intercommunication, and feedback so employees know exactly where they have freedom and where they have constraints.
If you want superfan employees who proudly promote your brand, not quietly update their résumés, this episode gives you a concrete playbook for company culture alignment that actually scales.
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Key Takeaways
- Company culture alignment beats “best place to work” copycatting Matthew explains why imitating award-winning cultures often backfires and how to design a culture that fits your business realities.
- The Square Management System: four sides that define your culture
- Identity, Instruction, Intercommunication, and Information Feedback form a “square” that sets clear boundaries and freedoms for every role.
- Constrained independence: your secret weapon for speed and trust When employees know exactly where they can make decisions, you get faster execution, higher trust, and far fewer “Dad, can I?” approvals.
- Not a bad culture—just a misaligned culture Most problems aren’t about “toxic” people; they’re about people whose decision-making style doesn’t match the company’s constraints.
- Why onboarding is game day, not a warm-up Culture is cemented by how you onboard, train, and transfer knowledge—if you wing it, employees create their own unofficial standards.
- Culture in M&A: do the squares even overlap? Matthew shares how he’s used company culture alignment as a decisive factor to walk away from deals that would have wrecked both teams.
- Employees as superfans and brand evangelists When people fit the square, they brag about your company the way sports fans brag about their team—recruiting great talent for free.
- Leaders must have the courage to let misaligned stars go Keeping a high-performing but toxic “all-star” tells everyone the culture square doesn’t actually matter—and the locker room rots from within.
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Guest Bio
Matthew Person is the founder of Town Square Advisors and creator of the Square Management System, a practical framework for company culture alignment in middle-market businesses. With a background spanning pro sports operations, investment banking, corporate development, and private equity portfolio companies, Matthew has seen the good, bad, and ugly of culture firsthand. He now helps leaders design aligned organizations that scale without losing their soul.
Freddy D’s Take
Matthew doesn’t talk about culture like a poster on the wall—he talks about it like a playbook. In this conversation, he takes us from vague “good vibes” culture to clear, designed company culture alignment using his Square Management System.
We dive into how identity, instruction, intercommunication, and information feedback form the four sides of a square where employees can operate with constrained independence—enough freedom to act, enough structure to stay on mission. That’s how you get a team that trusts each other, makes micro-decisions quickly, and actually enjoys rowing in the same direction.
This is exactly the kind of thinking I champion inside my SUPERFANS Framework™ and Prosperity Pathway™ coaching—turning entire ecosystems (employees, contractors, suppliers, partners, and clients) into business superfans who proudly champion your brand. When your internal culture clicks into alignment, external advocacy becomes inevitable.
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One Action
The Action:
Map your first Culture Square with your leadership team.
Who:
Founders, CEOs, and senior leaders (plus HR/People leaders).
Why:
Because without explicit company culture alignment, every department invents its own rules. That kills trust, slows decisions, and quietly drives away your best people. When you define the square together, you set one playbook for everyone to run.
How:
- Block 60–90 minutes with your leadership team.
- On a whiteboard, draw a square and label the sides: Identity, Instruction, Intercommunication, Information Feedback.
- For each side, list your current reality (what actually happens, not what’s on the wall).
- Then define your ideal level of constraint (heavy, moderate, light) for each side.
- Capture gaps, pick one side of the square to improve first, and assign clear owners and deadlines.
Connect with Matthew Person:
- Website: townsquare-advisors.com
- LinkedIn: Search “Matthew Person Town Square Advisors”
- Book Reservation: Via townsquare-advisors.com – The Culture of Alignment
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Transcripts
Almost 50% of new hires don't make it 18 months.
Speaker A:They leave or they get fired.
Speaker B:But I am the world's biggest super fan.
Speaker B:You're like a super fan.
Speaker B:Welcome to the Business Superfans Podcast.
Speaker B:We will discuss how establishing business superfans from customers, employees and business partners can elevate your success exponentially.
Speaker B:Learn why these advocates are a key factor to achieving excellence in the world of commerce.
Speaker B:This is the Business Super Super Fans Podcast with your host, Freddy D. Freddy.
Speaker A:Freddie.
Speaker C:Hey super fans Superstar Freddy D. Here in this episode164 we're joined by Matt Person and we're digging into a challenge every service based business wrestles with.
Speaker C:How do you build a culture where people are aligned, accountable and actually pulling in the same direction?
Speaker C:Matt has spent more than 20 years in strategy, M and A and executive leadership and his proprietary square management system offers a clear, practical path to creating high trust, high performance organizations.
Speaker C:From his clear days in middle market investment banking to a decade leading operations in professional sports and later guiding multiple private equity backed companies, Matt has seen firsthand what strong culture makes possible.
Speaker C:If you ever felt the pain of misalignment, internal friction, or a team that just isn't clicking, this conversation shows you how to fix it and unlock a workplace that works.
Speaker D:Welcome Matt to the Business Superfans podcast.
Speaker D:Good conversation we had before we started recording and welcome from Boston.
Speaker D:I've had some fond memories of my years in the tech space and spending many times in Faneuil hall, downtown and Waltham and used to be a place called no Names which was a really great seafood restaurant.
Speaker A:I don't think it's still there, but hopefully they get stuck into a traffic route in Fanuille Hall.
Speaker A:It's still bad, it's bought Boston, traffic's still bad.
Speaker D:I'm not surprised.
Speaker D:That place that the no Names was a great place because they had the boats right outside and you came in picnic tables inside, paper plates and there was a line.
Speaker A:Yeah, I don't know it now, but still a lot of great restaurants in the air.
Speaker A:A lot of great seafood for sure.
Speaker D:So let's go back Matt to the sort of how did you get going.
Speaker A:With the derivation of.
Speaker A:And its main framework, which is the square management system really came out of a few things.
Speaker A:One, I have a little bit of a varied background across both executive management, investment banking and buy side corporate development with private equity portfolio companies, but all kind of framed in around the middle market.
Speaker A:Over the years I've seen the good, the bad and the ugly companies that have really done a great job organizing themselves to create value.
Speaker A:And those that maybe didn't quite position themselves for success and saw the negative attributes, whether that was a lesser enterprise valuation, a time to market or whether that impacted their ability to scale.
Speaker A:So the focus for Townsquare Advisors really started to help the middle market, which sometimes doesn't get as much attention as everyone wants to be enterprise.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:It just sounds great to say that was to really focus on the lower middle market and help the businesses that really could, could hopefully with a couple tweaks and a couple changes, spark some growth.
Speaker A:The framework though, that really helped catapult Town Square to life actually started as an interview question.
Speaker A:To be honest with you, maybe at this point eight years ago, I was asked how I as a former manager would help constrain culture and keep culture in a 500 plus employee environment.
Speaker A:But those employees were spread over three states and four offices.
Speaker A:And my answer was met with silence from the recruiter who said, you should do something with that.
Speaker A:That's the most interesting response I've ever had to that question.
Speaker A:And it kind of peak I was like, really?
Speaker A:And so there's a little imposter syndrome that happens.
Speaker A:I'm sure when people come to these ideas, like is that really true?
Speaker A:But along the way I was naturally kind of pushed.
Speaker A:I would talk to people about it, it kind of stuck in the back of my head.
Speaker A:I would kind of work on it and people kind of pushed me forward and said, hey, there's something there.
Speaker A:I was humbled by that.
Speaker A:There was this, hey, that's unique.
Speaker A:It sounds relatively simple, but it's a unique concept.
Speaker A:You should do something with that.
Speaker A:Finally, over the years of just kind of hemming and hawing and drafting this and talking about that, I finally put it down on paper and drafted the entire concept and put it all together and I'm excited to share that today.
Speaker A:So the concept is around again.
Speaker A:That aforementioned what's good and what's bad and how did that happen?
Speaker A:But it's framed around culture.
Speaker A:The reason for that is culture.
Speaker A:As everyone knows that that's what makes good companies, right?
Speaker A:You've got great culture, you have this natural kind of energy and hum in the business.
Speaker A:That's how you get growth and scale.
Speaker A:You're a more efficient machine.
Speaker A:Everyone wants that.
Speaker A:What I fear has happened, what I've seen is that corporate cultures kind of become common sized.
Speaker A:We've taken this view of, listen, you're a best place to work.
Speaker A:I'm going to actually go interview all these best places to work and I'm going to common size, all the attributes and I'm going to tell you the six different things or the five things, or I'm going to talk the CEOs of those companies and tell you what they have all done and we'll harmonize around those collective sentiments.
Speaker A:That's interesting and it's good to know how those things happened.
Speaker A:But it doesn't parlay to you, to your company, to your circumstance.
Speaker A:Every culture has got this uniqueness to it and a lot of people say that's amorphous.
Speaker A:That's just there's a ways of doing and you learn that as you come in.
Speaker A:I kind of sat there one day and said, no, like we can do better.
Speaker A:Culture is not really amorphous and it shouldn't be common size.
Speaker A:We shouldn't just copy what someone else did.
Speaker A:That doesn't mean it's going to work for me.
Speaker A:So the square management system effectively says we've got culture all wrong.
Speaker A:It's this one way, common sized view.
Speaker A:Let's actually instead realize that good culture is nothing but the alignment between the individual staffer and their ways of doing, their beliefs, their approach and the company's beliefs, approach and ways of doing.
Speaker A:When you align to a degree and we'll get into what that degree means, then you love it.
Speaker A:If you don't really align to the company, you're not a fit.
Speaker A:You don't, but that doesn't make you a bad employee and it doesn't make the company a bad company either.
Speaker A:It just means you didn't fit.
Speaker A:That's okay.
Speaker A:There's a lot of companies out there, there's a lot of people.
Speaker A:So that's the goal.
Speaker A:How do you then understand how to create that alignment?
Speaker A:That's what the square management does.
Speaker A:The system is designed to allow you to understand all the systems, the procedures, the processes that make up a company to then affect the right degree of culture that you want to affect as a leader so that you know the employees you should bring in and you can align with.
Speaker A:When you achieve that understanding and you put the system to work, you will get that harmony that you're missing.
Speaker D:Because the team is really everything.
Speaker D:I use the analogy of a racing rowing team and in front of the boat, that's really kind of getting everybody in line.
Speaker D:But the goal is you got eight people that have a single oar and you've got to get those people in synchronization with the same mission, with the vision.
Speaker D:And they're all different, different individuals.
Speaker D:And you Got to get them all aligned just to use your point.
Speaker D:Rowing in sync in direction of the leader.
Speaker D:And everybody's got to be in sync.
Speaker D:Once you get that machine in sync, it scales.
Speaker D:And just like a racing rowboat flies through the water, guys are blinded when they're training.
Speaker D:And because they're going with everybody, the rhythm, the breathing, everything.
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Speaker A:It's true.
Speaker A:The problem is that we don't really understand, at least in my view.
Speaker A:We haven't really taken the time to step back and understand what that means.
Speaker A:We're moving.
Speaker A:Sometimes business moves such a pace, they just go, hey, if that's the best place to work, it should work for us, right?
Speaker A:So we copy.
Speaker A:And that's common.
Speaker A:That's very common.
Speaker A:People do that in all kinds of things.
Speaker A:They want to be a professional athlete.
Speaker A:Let's copy what the professional athletes do, because if they did that to get there, then I.
Speaker A:If I do that, I'll get there too.
Speaker A:I think that that's an easy out, so to speak.
Speaker A:We should step back and really understand what it means.
Speaker A:What I've put together with alignment is this degree of alignment.
Speaker A:That is a key concept I call constrained independence.
Speaker A:Constrained independence is the known degree to which an employee can action their own independent idea.
Speaker A:If you, Freddie, went into a new job and you had just what we would call complete independence, you could do whatever you wanted to.
Speaker A:But that obviously isn't the way business works because in order to meet a service delivery or a product quality, a parameter, there's some degree of what a constraint that's framing your ability to act.
Speaker A:Some people really love what I call heavy degree of constraint.
Speaker A:There is effectively not a lot of ideation, not a lot of ability to act independently.
Speaker A:Now why is that actually preferred?
Speaker A:Because that's what some people actually like.
Speaker A:Other people, they want to innovate, they want to have freedom.
Speaker A:I'm gonna solve this myself.
Speaker A:They want what I would call a light degree of constraint.
Speaker A:The reason they like that is cause that's how they think.
Speaker A:That's the environment that they succeed.
Speaker A:When some people are a little bit more in the middle companies, in the human, the employee have to map that degree of constraint to some degree.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:They don't have to be.
Speaker A:It's not binary.
Speaker A:You're not as rigid.
Speaker A:But there is a square that those employees bounce in.
Speaker A:Why is that square important?
Speaker A:We'll get to the sides in a second.
Speaker A:If you're inside the box, right, then you know the boundaries.
Speaker A:You know when and when you cannot make a decision.
Speaker A:You know what decisions you can make.
Speaker A:That gives you the freedom of speed, right?
Speaker A:You don't have to ask all the time, hey, Freddie, can I do this?
Speaker A:Can I do this?
Speaker A:Can I do this?
Speaker A:You don't have to ask that.
Speaker A:You can just go, you can just do.
Speaker A:When you're able to make micro decisions, that means you affect the outcome of the company.
Speaker A:People need to feel empowered, as if they're contributing to the larger story of this company's growth.
Speaker A:When you have that feeling of attachment, you're a happier employee.
Speaker A:When you know your other employees are inside the box, you trust them to make decisions too.
Speaker A:You don't have to worry about, hey, I don't know if that answer is correct.
Speaker A:Is this person sandbagging me?
Speaker A:Is there something else going on here?
Speaker A:You create trust.
Speaker A:When you create trust and loyalty and speed, you get a happy employee, you get a loyal employee.
Speaker A:Everyone knows that hiring a new employee and training them is slower and costlier than just retaining and upskilling a new employee, existing employee.
Speaker A:So when you have people who can all bounce inside that box, whatever size it is, is.
Speaker A:We'll get to that in a second.
Speaker A:Then you have that efficient culture.
Speaker A:That's that high trust, high performing organization that everyone wants.
Speaker D:That's what I call a super fan team.
Speaker D:So you've got everybody that's becomes a super fan of the leadership of the company.
Speaker D:And there is no better advocate for a business than a super fan.
Speaker D:You coming from a sports background, you understand the value of super fans.
Speaker D:And that's really what you want to create in that company is a super fan environment.
Speaker D:I call it a super fan environment because now that person, just as you mentioned within, they have the authority within their space.
Speaker D:They are empowered to re emphasize those things.
Speaker D:But now they're telling all their friends that say, man, I got a great company.
Speaker D:I have these leeways, I can do these things.
Speaker D:It's transformative.
Speaker D:And going back to the racing rowing boat, now you're getting everybody in line for the company's direction.
Speaker D:That's how those companies that have that momentum and that's how they get that momentum by getting everybody in the game.
Speaker A:You get there the right way to go back to that common size approach.
Speaker A:It's in force right now.
Speaker A:There's a reason it doesn't work.
Speaker A:And a lot of people are going to say, well, wait a second, that's the best place to work.
Speaker A:I don't know about you, but I know a lot of people who work at best places to work that never really actually liked working there.
Speaker A:There's two things that happen.
Speaker A:One, I've never met a hiring manager in HR department who said their culture was terrible.
Speaker A:Has any listener ever interviewed for a job and heard, hey, you know what, Freddy?
Speaker A:This is kind of a tough place to work.
Speaker A:We don't really have the greatest culture.
Speaker A:But if you're willing to do it right, that's not the way that goes.
Speaker A:Correspondingly, one of my favorite statements, no employee starts their first day disgruntled.
Speaker A:It just doesn't happen.
Speaker A:You can imagine the hilarity of someone walking in like disgruntled, sitting down in their cubicle and you know, mumbling, but that's not the way it is.
Speaker A:So when you have great on one side and you have great on the other side.
Speaker A:But if I'm going to throw one statistic at you, it's almost 50%.
Speaker A:According to research, almost 50% of new hires don't make it 18 months.
Speaker A:They leave or they get fired.
Speaker A:Obviously that best places to work copy, it doesn't work right.
Speaker A:How do we get so wrong?
Speaker A:We've taken this common sized approach.
Speaker A:We don't understand the actual culture that sits in the company.
Speaker A:And so there's this material bait and switch that happens.
Speaker A:And I'm sure a lot of listeners probably feel this way.
Speaker A:I was told X and I got there and there's why.
Speaker A:And it's because the hiring manager is just painting a Picture of something that probably isn't the way the company works.
Speaker A:When they get there, they realize that the ways of doing, the beliefs, all that systems, all the things that are there isn't true.
Speaker A:So their purpose, their attachment, their loyalty, their trusted falls apart and they go somewhere else.
Speaker D:You bring up a great point that I want to really emphasize, Matt.
Speaker D:I look at it, I'm going to put it in a sales term or a sales analogy, I should say.
Speaker D:People always think that the sale is the transaction and really the transaction is the transaction.
Speaker D:The sale is everything that happens after the transaction.
Speaker D:So it's the same thing when you're onboarding an employee.
Speaker D:The sale is everything that happens after that person says, I accept the job.
Speaker D:That whole onboarding experience, the whole integration into the team, the whole job description.
Speaker D:One of the things I learned in Dale Carnegie management class was I didn't create the job description for people.
Speaker D:I would flip it around and have them create the job description of what they think would be success at their position.
Speaker D:And what happened is they owned it because it was their description.
Speaker D:They wrote it, I tweaked it.
Speaker D:So it aligns with the company.
Speaker D:And now my job is to just keep you and assist you in being able to do the stuff you said you were going to do to be successful.
Speaker A:Yeah, I mean, it's another way.
Speaker A:If you could take away 20 of someone's job they hate and give it to somebody else and have them only do 80 what they like, you'd probably have a better staff.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:Very true.
Speaker A:You really look at the way companies need to start to operate is to start to understand, well, then what makes that degree of independence?
Speaker A:What constraints should I put in place?
Speaker A:Listen, this isn't applicable to everything.
Speaker A:There are some companies, my sister's a doctor.
Speaker A:There is no variability there.
Speaker A:That's a life or death situation.
Speaker A:You really don't have discretion to a degree.
Speaker A:There is an environment that needs to be adhered to in order to save lives.
Speaker A:In manufacturing plants, you have a product quality concern or you have a certain level of output you have to produce on the floor, there's not a lot of degree of variability.
Speaker A:There's probably going to be a very heavily constrained environment there, and that makes sense.
Speaker A:But for businesses that have an ability to actually affect a degree of variability in their product and service quality or just how the way they go about doing the system is pretty applicable.
Speaker A:That degree of constraint matters.
Speaker A:You and I have different ways of doing things.
Speaker A:We have different beliefs, we have different values.
Speaker A:Now a listener is probably saying, matt, I got a company with 100 employees, 100,000 employees, 10,000 employees.
Speaker A:How am I going to get all those people inside the same box?
Speaker A:That's, that's ridiculous.
Speaker A:There's too many people.
Speaker A:And that's, to a degree why we got to the common sized approach in the first place.
Speaker A:We created this really huge and wide and broad structure so that no one could be upset.
Speaker A:And as you know, in sales, if you sell everything to everyone, you sell nothing.
Speaker A:So you cannot be a jack of all trades.
Speaker A:From a culture perspective, it just doesn't work.
Speaker A:You're going to upset somebody and in the end you probably end up upsetting everybody because you don't have a defined system.
Speaker A:The key here is that there really is no bad culture, there's no bad employee.
Speaker A:I'm going to just forego the fraud and the people who steal and all kind of stuff.
Speaker A:A regular general employee, there really isn't a bad one.
Speaker A:They just have to find the right alignment.
Speaker A:How do you create that?
Speaker A:There's a method to this madness.
Speaker A:The square itself is that level of constraint.
Speaker A:And it can be intentionally designed.
Speaker A:And that's the key part.
Speaker A:It's intentional and it needs to be done by either the C suite or the CEO, depending on the size of your company.
Speaker A:And you can actually use this as a diagnostic.
Speaker A:It's a great tool for the middle layer, the executive layer, the senior layer.
Speaker A:You actually put them all together and you can aggregate the scores and you can figure out really quickly where you have a disconnect in the company.
Speaker A:So what are those sides?
Speaker A:The first side is identity.
Speaker A:That is who you are as a company.
Speaker A:A lot of companies actually get this wrong.
Speaker A:That's how your organization defines yourself, your mission, your values.
Speaker A:Some companies don't even have a mission statement or they plank it on the wall and no one reads it.
Speaker A:That's your brand personality, your core beliefs.
Speaker A:The key question here, do our staff and do our customers know what we stand for and why?
Speaker A:The biggest failure on this one that I see, of all the companies I talk to on an annual basis, they get what I call product to mission drift, going shorter term, going off strategy.
Speaker A:All of a sudden they're doing one thing, they've marketed one thing, and then they go make an acquisition.
Speaker A:Everyone's kind of like, what did you do that for?
Speaker A:And they read the press release and it makes no sense and everyone starts to get confused and it causes distrust in the employees and the community and the clients.
Speaker A:Instruction is how we operate.
Speaker A:The clarity and consistency of expectations, that's your Onboarding processes, your training, your knowledge transfer systems.
Speaker A:The key question for executives here is our roles and expectations and processes.
Speaker A:This is clear and scalable.
Speaker A:There's 10 elements in each of these, by the way.
Speaker A:So you get to 40 elements and instruction really matters.
Speaker A:If you don't onboard people the right way, that's where you run into a lot of culture problems.
Speaker A:You end up by default.
Speaker A:You let the employees then figure out what the standard is and then you get fiefdoms because the finance team might be operating differently from the sales team and you have chaos.
Speaker A:The third side is intercommunication.
Speaker A:That's how you interact.
Speaker A:A lot of people think this is culture.
Speaker A:This is the happy hours on Thursdays and the ping pong table and the foyer.
Speaker A:But it's just part of culture.
Speaker A:This is how you interact.
Speaker A:Your hierarchy, your meeting cadence, communication tools, your tone.
Speaker A:There's definitely some places where tone means a big thing, can't be negative.
Speaker A:Sometimes there's an overt positivism and you can't say anything negative and that causes problems.
Speaker A:The key part about intercommunication is how information flows.
Speaker A:Is information flowing in a way that drives clarity and trust?
Speaker A:If the tone's wrong, if the messaging wrong, the frontline workers are not going to get that message.
Speaker A:Then lastly is information feedback.
Speaker A:That's how you improve.
Speaker A:This is how performance is measured, it's how it's shared, it's how it's used to evolve the company.
Speaker A:Those are feedback loops, performance metrics, things like that.
Speaker A:Are you learning?
Speaker A:Key question, Are you learning and adapting fast enough to stay competitive?
Speaker A:When you take all 10 elements from each side and each side, by the way, doesn't need to be the same, you're going to have high and medium levels of constraint across each question.
Speaker A:You put those together and you have a structure that will result in your organization.
Speaker A:That is your way of doing as a company.
Speaker A:I think people then becomes the HR team to make sure that people coming into the business actually map to those attributes.
Speaker D:You bring up some great points because one of the things I remember years ago I was managing a district for a software company and we did personality training, the different quadrants and all that stuff.
Speaker D:And back then we called it, there was a driver, expressive, amiable and analytical.
Speaker D:And then there's four quadrants within that.
Speaker D:And what we did was the sales training with our distribution channel.
Speaker D:And I was one of the trainers that did that whole training and put it together.
Speaker D:But we learned each different personality types, we got tested.
Speaker D:So we knew our personality types.
Speaker D:I think A lot of times that companies make a mistake is not really helping the team understand how each other prefer to be communicated with.
Speaker D:If you can do that up front and says, okay, this is how this person prefers to be communicated, this is this person's personality type, you get some of that stuff out of the way and you start minimizing communication challenges between individuals.
Speaker D:Because my personality type is I'm a driver.
Speaker D:Give me the bottom line.
Speaker D:I don't need the three year explanation.
Speaker D:Give me the two minute drill, please.
Speaker D:But if I don't respect that other person, then I start creating a negative situation within a team.
Speaker D:Because now I'm basically making that feel per person feel stupid because I'm like, okay, you know, Matt, get to the point, let's get there.
Speaker D:The other way is, you know, I'm being felt that you don't care and don't hear me out.
Speaker D:Those little things are really kind of become the big things within a company culture.
Speaker D:And I'm just bringing this up because it's overlooked that people don't spend time learning how to assimilate.
Speaker A:You make a great point.
Speaker A:These all.
Speaker A:If you went through each 40 pieces of the element, you might say in isolation that this is Matt, this is obvious.
Speaker A:Or that's a simple element.
Speaker A:I've found a lot of management, having managed a lot of teams over the years and the companies, the little things to your point are they add up.
Speaker D:Those are big things, little things.
Speaker D:One of my sayings is the little things are really.
Speaker A:It's very true.
Speaker A:It's a great statement because the.
Speaker A:Where you report, how you report.
Speaker A:Do you have to go into the office?
Speaker A:Do you not?
Speaker A:There's a huge, obviously huge conversation right now about return to work.
Speaker A:And you saw what I would call really much.
Speaker A:Jamie Dimon said, hey, everyone needs to go back to work.
Speaker A:And then what happened?
Speaker A:Oh, Jamie Dimon said, we all got to go back to work and everyone started going to return to office.
Speaker A:Was that the right move for them?
Speaker A:So we started copying again.
Speaker A:I think there's so many little things like that that add up.
Speaker A:So there's 40 points in isolation to your point are small, but in aggregate become the way of doing at the company that really determines whether I have a good culture or not.
Speaker A:You have a misaligned culture.
Speaker A:Part of that is just the ramifications.
Speaker A:There's a company I'm working with right now where it was very clear that directions would go out from the corporate office.
Speaker A:This is what we're doing.
Speaker A:And the middle staff would go, I don't know that doesn't, I don't really want to do that.
Speaker A:I'm not going to do that.
Speaker A:I don't think that's the right idea.
Speaker A:And they wouldn't do it and all kinds of problems and then things would fail and they'd be like look, it failed.
Speaker A:And I'm like, well it didn't fail because it was a bad idea.
Speaker A:It failed because they had an execution in an oversight problem.
Speaker D:There was no buy in.
Speaker D:You've got leadership.
Speaker D:There's several types of different leaders.
Speaker D:There's leaders that actually empower people and really give people their leeway and then there's people that are directive and says this is how you're going to do it, this is what we want done and you got no say in the matter.
Speaker D:That's really not a conducive environment for long term growth and everything else.
Speaker D:You really need to blend the two in a sense that says, hey, this is where we need to go and here's why we need to go and what's your ideas of how we can get there?
Speaker D:And you know, because for example, a couple years ago I was running a interpreting and translation company and they had been around for decades and but they plateaued and we changed our whole directive within the company.
Speaker D:We changed the outlook of how we were dealing with contractors and customers and everything else and we scaled that company by close to a million dollars in one year.
Speaker D:And they've been flatlined for decades.
Speaker D:Decades because we changed the internal aspect of it.
Speaker D:You know, with what you said earlier, we had a mission statement that we were striving to be.
Speaker D:It was no, we are the premier company in this state and surrounding states and that was the mindset.
Speaker D:It was okay, now we need to act like this company and go from there.
Speaker D:And that's.
Speaker D:That's true.
Speaker A:The other part of it I would argue you around alignment too is that not everyone fits the box.
Speaker A:So if you are going to leverage this and most everyone who uses this system is not building a company, this is great for startups.
Speaker A:You have great IP and you don't know how to build a company.
Speaker A:You walk through all the 40 elements and it's going to tell.
Speaker A:It'll help you.
Speaker A:And in the book that I've written around this that is pending publication, it'll go through all the elements and you can very quickly see the book's called the Culture of Alignment which I think is more than appropriate for this endeavor.
Speaker A:You can actually go on townsquare-advisors.com which is my website and Take the survey all either a free quiz, 10 points just to learn a little bit more.
Speaker A:A lot of people are really curious what is the environment I work well in is you could do it as an individual because this is a two way street.
Speaker A:We're talking here about the executive approach, but the individual owns a lot of this as well.
Speaker A:You got to know who you are as an employee and you could take a free quiz as an executive.
Speaker A:But if you want to dig in and take the 40.1, you can see the different attributes and start to understand what a high level, a moderate or a low level constraint for that specific element would be.
Speaker A:The key part though is once that box is there, there's two things that have to happen and this is where things go awry.
Speaker A:And I'm sure you can understand this given your background.
Speaker A:One is people don't complete the box and then that leaves it to the interpretation of a specific individual, leader or a collective.
Speaker A:That's bad because you're going to get variants.
Speaker A:People actually drift from the square.
Speaker A:And so over time they don't really kind of go back and make sure they're on point.
Speaker A:That's where the feedback loop comes in really helpful.
Speaker A:And you get kind of culture shift over time and that causes problems.
Speaker A:All of a sudden someone wakes up one day and goes, wait a second, this isn't what I believe anymore or what I prefer anymore.
Speaker A:Then you have problems.
Speaker A:The last part that's really hard for most companies is having the constitution to stick to what you said your first square was.
Speaker A:And that means that not everyone fits in the square.
Speaker A:So if a company's going to take this view and build their processes in their systems and they realize that Freddie's out there in sales running amok, but he's the number one sales guy in the entire company.
Speaker A:But he's kind of abusive and no one really likes working with him.
Speaker A:You gotta let Freddie go.
Speaker A:And a lot of people have a hard time with that.
Speaker A:And that's where culture becomes a problem.
Speaker A:Because when you let Freddie stay and tell everyone else, it doesn't really matter.
Speaker D:What you do, you poison the whole team.
Speaker D:Because now that you've lost credibility and.
Speaker A:It'S terrible and a lot, I've seen that myself firsthand, where you, you lost all credibility.
Speaker A:It's like, wait a second, there's one company that worked for you.
Speaker A:We had a guy punch a hole in the wall and they walked over and they took a picture frame and they just moved it over the hole and they put the picture on top of it and walked and went back to work.
Speaker A:I have plenty of stories about this stuff.
Speaker D:Do you have a story that you work with somebody that you put your framework into place, they became one of your super fans of?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:I've used this in isolation.
Speaker A:The book is forthcoming.
Speaker A:It's a new iteration.
Speaker A:But I've used this throughout my entire career.
Speaker A:That's where the answer is.
Speaker A:Answer to the interview question came from the course.
Speaker A:The concept was in nascent form.
Speaker A:I'll give you a couple different examples.
Speaker A:One is in M and A. I do a lot of work around M and A.
Speaker A:Culture is a huge part of what kills M and A.
Speaker A:When you take the survey, each side gets its own score.
Speaker A:And by the way, they shouldn't be the same.
Speaker A:So if you're, you know, moderate here and heavy there and light there, that's okay.
Speaker A:But you should understand who you are as a company and you should score your acquired company and.
Speaker A:Or the company that you're looking to acquire and you can immediately tell where the variances are.
Speaker A:Those variances can be either fixable and identifiable in an acquisition scenario or they may not.
Speaker A:There was a time where we were looking at a company and we had understood a lot about our culture.
Speaker A:We had a hybrid system.
Speaker A:We were looking at a company that was entirely remote and we decided not to pursue the acquisition.
Speaker A:Even though there was a lot of great things about that business.
Speaker A:But that culture of that business.
Speaker A:There was staff all over the country.
Speaker A:There was no way.
Speaker A:And the place that I worked really strongly convicted in being in office.
Speaker A:Not a hybrid system like five days a week.
Speaker A:How would we have put those offices in?
Speaker A:They didn't have enough areas where there was a common ground.
Speaker A:So we couldn't put in new offices around those places.
Speaker A:And we weren't going to force all those people to move either.
Speaker A:So in short, we said no, it's going to be too much from an integration perspective to get these people into our culture.
Speaker A:We're not going to do the deal.
Speaker A:And I think that.
Speaker A:And a lot of people would say that doesn't make any sense.
Speaker A:And to me it makes perfect sense.
Speaker D:I was going to agree with you 100.
Speaker D:It makes perfect sense because you would have just created a toxic culture for both organizations and really you would have tanked the acquiring corporation because people there would have been pissed off and it would have been a combobulated and.
Speaker A:And I think that that's a one use case and it's a true story.
Speaker A:I think that's one example of.
Speaker A:That's part of the intercommunication side of things where people work, who they report to and how you can't have people in beanbags and hallways or working fully remote and then force them into an office space.
Speaker A:It just doesn't work and it's in it.
Speaker A:And we talked about this in it's small things are big things.
Speaker A:That sounds like a small thing, but it's a big thing in actuality.
Speaker D:Let's flip this a little bit and leverage some of your sports background because I want to really talk a little bit about the importance of creating super fans and how teams what they do because you've got a sports background to create their fans to wear the gear to promote the team.
Speaker D:This is things that this aligns with.
Speaker D:What you're doing now is using that sports background to get businesses to get their teams aligned so that they're promoting that business.
Speaker D:Because there is no better pr.
Speaker D:You can have all the Google Analytics you want till you're blue in the face, but you get a momentum of all your stakeholders, everybody in the equation, leadership, team, employees, contractors, suppliers, distributors, complementary businesses, ancillary businesses, all aligned and rowing in that rowing boat.
Speaker A:It's 100% true.
Speaker A:You've got to be able to do that.
Speaker A:And for clarity for the viewer, I would love to say that I was an actual professional athlete.
Speaker A:So when Freddie mentions my sports background, I was on the business side managing franchise operations and leading that by the end of my career.
Speaker A:And it was a wonderful experience lived all over the countries.
Speaker A:And as many stories I have of companies going awry from an alignment perspective, I have stories of baseball players doing dumb things for another podcast and another time.
Speaker A:But it is true.
Speaker A:I think there is no better way to build a business than to get that superfan to have people talking positively about you and the way to go.
Speaker A:How do you do that with the square management system is the output of the system is an employee base will speak very highly of where they work and good attracts good, so to speak.
Speaker A:And everyone wants to work at great places instead of relying on the best place to work designation that someone else quantified.
Speaker A:There is no better attribute than a recommendation from an occur employee to someone else that they should work there.
Speaker A:That doesn't happen in poorly aligned businesses at all, but it does happen in correctly and highly aligned organizations.
Speaker A:You get the employee doing all the work for you and attracting the best talent.
Speaker A:And attracting talent's tough.
Speaker A:There's a lot of options for the A level talent to go, but they want to be somewhere where they can fit best.
Speaker A:I Do think there's a reason on my website, on townsquare-advisors.com you can go take the individual version of this test.
Speaker A:Because people need to be more responsible for where they work.
Speaker A:Now I get it.
Speaker A:Everyone in life has had to take a job to pay the bills and not had the luxury of choice.
Speaker A:But when you do find yourself in a position where you have the benefit of choice, you need to understand where you're going to best work.
Speaker A:Too many people chameleon themselves into a role and suffer the weight of that misery because they decided to take the job for X and Y reason when maybe they should.
Speaker D:That's going to come across because tonality and energy, you can't hide it.
Speaker D:You answer the phone, it's going to come across.
Speaker D:Your emails, choice of words show come across.
Speaker D:And that employee is the front line to a supplier.
Speaker D:And they start chastising the supplier because of a delivery or whatever the situation might be, that guy's going to slowboat it or gal's going to slowboat it even more because now you've upset them.
Speaker D:And really it's a whole ecosystem that's affecting it.
Speaker D:Because that alignment within that company, if it's not aligned, it's going to really affect the whole chain of all the components of that business.
Speaker D:Because if they get parts from a supplier, if they have a distribution outlet for stuff, if they work with contractors, they partner up with other businesses.
Speaker A:Employee, if you're not aligned, it comes across in the employee.
Speaker A:And so employees know a little bit about themselves and we've all made that mistake.
Speaker A:And that's part of it.
Speaker A:I know I have.
Speaker A:I think part of why I'm passionate about this is because I've definitely made that mistake.
Speaker A:I definitely took a job and said no, it'll work out, it'll be fine.
Speaker A:I saw little red flags and I know I'm not really a fan of X, Y and Z, but it'll be fine.
Speaker A:And you kind of kid yourself into thinking that it's going to be okay and then you get there and it's not and you're miserable.
Speaker A:It's the worst and it's not worth it.
Speaker A:And then you have to figure out how to dig yourself out of that hole.
Speaker A:The corresponding part of it is that, that I think too is I've seen too many employees suffer the scarlet letter that is.
Speaker A:Well, wait a second, it didn't work out.
Speaker A:That must be you, not the company.
Speaker A:So it's a two way street.
Speaker A:It's on the employee.
Speaker A:We gotta get the employees the Individuals, really, you gotta be strong and knowing who you are and where you fit.
Speaker A:And companies need to be better in acknowledging that they're responsible for the output, the culture, the retention.
Speaker A:If there's a staff retention problem, if there's a revenue growth problem, a scale problem, and things start falling off, that's not the individual employee's fault.
Speaker A:That there is a lot of onus on the executive team who is responsible for manifesting said culture.
Speaker A:I always say there is no good culture, there's no bad culture, but there are misaligned cultures for sure.
Speaker A:So this book hopefully will help people, give them a diagnostic.
Speaker A:It should be actionable, it should be digestible.
Speaker A:The book is short.
Speaker A:The website will give you the kickstart into how to go do this.
Speaker A:The goal here isn't to turn this into a book you read and put it on yourself and go, that was interesting.
Speaker A:It's meant to be read, it's meant to be decided upon.
Speaker A:Hey, go take the quiz and figure out where you fit.
Speaker A:Go take the quiz and figure out what attributes you need to change in your company.
Speaker A:Because I don't really have an interest in making this anything more than something you can immediately action and digest and go do.
Speaker A:Assuming you believe that is the right way to run a company.
Speaker A:And I'd like to think that it is, because I've seen it work.
Speaker A:I've seen elements of work, not just in M and A, I've seen it work in other decisioning processes.
Speaker A:Give people the square to bounce around in, give them the parameters, educate them, instruct them, communicate around it, have a feedback loop in place to make sure you're adhering to it and it works.
Speaker A:That's how I ran the sports teams when I was there, or the departments I was in, or the function I was in.
Speaker A:Whatever level of career I was at that point in time, I gave people a square to work in just because we didn't in the sports days.
Speaker A:In the minors, you don't have a lot of resources, so I wasn't there to micromanage.
Speaker A:How am I going to micromanage those people?
Speaker A:I can't.
Speaker A:Too much going on, too much speed, too.
Speaker A:Too few people.
Speaker A:So I gave them a box to plan.
Speaker A:Hey, you can decide, make decisions in this realm.
Speaker A:If you got to step outside of it, come find me.
Speaker A:It worked amazingly and I was able to grow and scale.
Speaker D:The other thing you got to do is you gotta.
Speaker D:You know, one of my other quotes in my book, Creating Business Super Fans is people will crawl through broken glass for appreciation, recognition and to keep that momentum going and keep that alignment.
Speaker D:You also gotta recognize people for their contributions and everything else.
Speaker D:So it keeps them energized.
Speaker D:Because someone knocks it out of the park using a sports term, bam, grand slam.
Speaker D:Everybody high fives that person and recognizes them as, hey, good job.
Speaker D:You knocked it out of the ballpark.
Speaker D:You ignore it, they're gonna go, well, that wasn't worth it.
Speaker D:You start sliding backwards.
Speaker A:Exactly.
Speaker A:Hopefully people can step away from this conversation and realize that there is a way to do this.
Speaker A:I did actually ask AI what the best culture is.
Speaker A:Even though I just said there is no right culture, I asked AI to take the quiz.
Speaker A:What they said, interestingly enough, AI Said was identity.
Speaker A:Keep it moderate.
Speaker A:You need to have enough defined constraints to have the staff and the client base understand who you are, but enough flexibility to not get pigeonholed like Cracker Barrel did, where they're so tied to their logo that they can't deviate and modernize and scale.
Speaker A:So you need to have a little flexibility instruction, though.
Speaker A:Keep that heavy.
Speaker A:Make sure that everyone knows what they're doing, how they're doing it, why they're doing it, and adheres to the standard.
Speaker A:Because the biggest reason culture changes is the instruction part.
Speaker A:As I've said before, if you don't tell the employee how to do it, they're going to figure out how to do it themselves and set the standard.
Speaker A:And then you get a meaningful array of all kinds of problems because everyone else will have a different approach.
Speaker D:I want to emphasize one thing that you said here.
Speaker D:Matt was having understanding why you're doing it.
Speaker D:I had a guest on a show a while back talk about how this medical facility trained their team and a janitor, and asked a janitor what was his position.
Speaker D:His response was, my job is to help doctors save lives by keeping the place clean so people don't get infections.
Speaker D:So it's all about how you really put that into the people's head.
Speaker D:I'm really re emphasizing what you mentioned was the fact that they need to know why they're doing it.
Speaker D:And that janitor is just as important as the brain surgeon.
Speaker D:That's how that company was running itself, and that's why it was so successful, is because everybody was important in that whole organization.
Speaker D:They had a role to play, and he knew what their role was and how it contributed to the success.
Speaker A:And that's a wonderful point point.
Speaker A:My sports days, I used to pick up trash.
Speaker A:Everyone said, well, why would you do that?
Speaker A:You're at the top of food chain.
Speaker A:Why Would you be doing that?
Speaker A:I was like, well it's got to be clean and there's no rule and no responsibility that's too important for someone else to do.
Speaker A:Step in and do it.
Speaker A:And that's a mindset change.
Speaker A:So I love that analogy.
Speaker A:I think that's a great viewpoint.
Speaker A:Their job is to keep it clean so the doctors don't unintentionally hurt harm.
Speaker A:That's great.
Speaker D:They were proud of what they were doing because they were contributing to the wellness of everybody.
Speaker A:Box store about a year ago and buying appliance with my wife and the rep behind who was talking to us said all these.
Speaker A:Who's talking to us all about these things about the store.
Speaker A:Did you know that we were named X this store?
Speaker A:We were one of the first companies that soars in this chain to do this.
Speaker A:They had the utmost pride for they were super.
Speaker A:There's a super fan.
Speaker A:So much practice for what they had accomplished.
Speaker A:I don't know how many hundred, a couple hundred across the United States but they were the X and Y at this and I'd recognize for that.
Speaker A:And it showed.
Speaker A:Of course we did.
Speaker D:Matt.
Speaker C:As we come to the end, here.com.
Speaker A:Is where you can find the free quizzes both for an individual perspective and for an executive one.
Speaker A:Or you can deep dive into all 40 points.
Speaker A:Like I said, a lot of people enjoy taking that because they really find out a little bit more about themselves.
Speaker A:A lot of people come back to me and say I kind of knew this about me but I never thought about it that way.
Speaker A:Go there and you can find links to all those things.
Speaker A:You can also find a link to reserve the forthcoming publication the Culture of Alignment which really details things in much further.
Speaker A:It gets into a little bit of the philosophy, it's not long but the philosophy of why we've lost our way when it comes to perception of corporate culture and the common sized view of best places to work and how to fix it and why the system works.
Speaker A:But that's the best place to go to get started and learn more and hopefully you'll dig in and take advantage of everything that's on the website.
Speaker D:Make sure that that's in the show notes.
Speaker D:Great conversation, great insights for our listeners and definitely would love to have you on the show down the road.
Speaker A:Thank you for having me.
Speaker C:What an insightful conversation with Matt Person.
Speaker C:If there's one takeaway I want you to lock in, it's this alignment isn't an accident, it's a system.
Speaker C:And when you build a culture where.
Speaker D:People know the mission, own the role.
Speaker C:And trust each other to execute.
Speaker C:Everything gets easier, revenue grows, cleaner, decisions move faster, and your team actually enjoys showing up.
Speaker C:That's the heart of Matt's Square management system, and it's exactly what service based businesses need if they want to scale without chaos.
Speaker C:As you heard today, great culture isn't about slogans or perks.
Speaker C:It's about clarity, accountability and leadership that sets the tone.
Speaker C:And when you get those right, you're not just running a business, you're building an environment where superfans employees and clients naturally thrive.
Speaker C:If you're ready to turn insight into real momentum, step inside my Entrepreneur Prosperity community on School.
Speaker C:You can join for free.
Speaker C:It's where service based business leaders plug into clarity, support and proven systems so you can grow faster with less effort.
Speaker C:Join now at schoolskoop Eprosperity.
Speaker C:Thanks for tuning in today.
Speaker C:I'm grateful you're here on a Business Superfans journey.
Speaker C:Remember, one action, one stakeholder, one superfan closer to lasting prosperity.
Speaker B:We hope you took away some useful knowledge from today's episode of the Business Superfans Podcast.
Speaker B:The path to success relies on taking action.
Speaker B:So go over to businesssuperfans.com and get your hands on the book.
Speaker B:If you haven't already, join the accelerator community and take that first step in generating a team of passionate supporters for your business.
Speaker B:Join us on the next episode as we continue guiding you on your journey to achieve flourishing success in business.
