Business Podcasts | The Best-Selling Author of 8 Books (Kevin Freiberg) Teaches the Southwest Airlines Super Systems for Success + Randy Antrikin of PMHOKC.com Joins to Share How Clay Clark Has Helped Him to Grow His Company By 20X

Audio Transcription

Oh yeah. Thrive Nation on today’s show we are interviewing the man, the myth and the legend, the best-selling co-author of eight books. He’s a leadership expert, a sought-after speaker. He’s the man with a plan and he’s on today’s show. He’s a business leader. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Kevin Freiberg. Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. Two men. Eight kids, co-created by two different women. Thirteen multi-million dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thriving Time Show. Yes, yes, yes, and yes! Thrive Nation, on today’s show, we are interviewing the legendary, best-selling author, the incredible, the wonderful, the one and only, Mr. Kevin Freiberg. Kevin, how are you, sir? Doing great, Clay, and yourself? Today has been a great day. Every day, I think, as an entrepreneur is an adventure. We had a lot of wins here, a lot of exciting wins in the Thrive Nation, and you being the pinnacle of the wins, my friend. Thank you for investing, part of your time. Thank you for your kind. For those of us out there that aren’t familiar, you do these deep dives into what makes organizations and companies successful that are epic? You and your wife work on these books together. I just want to ask you, when did it occur to you or when did it occur to your wife that you two would team up to become full-time non-fiction business authors? Well, I think a long, long time ago. I hate to say it that way, but I had a passion for being in the speaking business and realized that I didn’t want to just be a motivational speaker. I wanted to do something that had depth and deep background research. I started that and we launched it with a book called Nuts and we just got so busy right away that Jackie left her role at the university and came to work with me and we’ve been doing it really ever since. And she just makes me better. So I’m glad she made that choice. When you wrote the book Nuts, the Southwest Airlines crazy recipe for business and personal success, that was I believe in 1997, I believe. And I had just started my first company called DJConnection.com in 1999. And my uncle, John Toon, flew, he was a pilot, he retired a pilot for Southwest Airlines. He was a Navy pilot and then right after the Navy went to fly for Southwest. And I saw that book on his shelf and I thought, I’ve got to read this book. And so as I was reading the book nuts, it blew me away how much access you had to Southwest and it was so actionable. And I implemented a lot of things I learned in that book. What inspired you to first study Southwest Airlines and to write such an epic deep dive book? You know, you’re insightful in that you realize we had some unprecedented access in that book. As you know, we just lost Herb Kelleher on January 3rd of this year, the founder of Southwest Airlines. Yeah, I’ll say. Probably no more, there’s no person in the world right now that Jackie and I would say has had a bigger influence on our careers, on our thinking about business and about life really, then Herb. And it all started with, I was traveling in and out of Texas from Albuquerque with a Spanish boot manufacturer trying to establish a distribution company here in the U.S. and I flew on Southwest and I knew I was going to go to graduate school and study business and communication and long story short I met a flight attendant who said well you need to come down to our company and meet Herbie. I’m going who the heck is Herbie? And the more she began to describe the company, the culture, and certainly the personality of Herb Kelleher. I just said, well, I have to go down and see him. And that’s what started it all. It culminated in a doctoral dissertation back in 1987 for me, and four years later, Jackie wrote another one on a broader perspective of the company. But by the time we got to NUTS, we had written two doctoral dissertations and knew them pretty well. We’re just forever grateful that they gave a couple of Greenhorn authors an opportunity. Well, what I’d like to do, because you had such a deep dive access, such an all-access pass into the company, I would love to see if you could break down three Herb Keller notable quotes for me, ones that I have in my office here. First one, Herb Keller talked about, and I’m quoting Herb, he said, treat your employees like customers. Could you explain to the Thrive Nation what that means? Yeah, you know, early on, I actually cornered Herb one day, like you could ever corner him, right? But I cornered him, and I said, Herb, who comes first, really, in your mind? The employees or the customers. He didn’t blink an eye. He just said, it’s always our employees because if you treat your employees right and you treat them like the internal customers that they are and give them the same kind of deference and honor and treat them with the same kind of dignity that you would a customer, they’re going to take care of your customers. And guess what? When they do that, shareholders become pretty happy. So he looked at it in a hierarchy of employees, customers, and shareholders, and I think he got that right. Now, Herb also went on to say, he says, you don’t hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills. That really impacted my business, DJConnection.com. Helped us grow and scale the company before I sold it. Can you talk about what that means, don’t hire for skills and train for attitude? Yeah, you know, in that case, you can train people to be a gate agent. You can train people through, you know, type ratings to fly a 737 and everything in between to fix them, be a mechanic, be a res agent. But what you can’t train is the character and the raw personality that someone brings to the business. And as you probably know, there are people who multiply, there are people who add, there are people who divide, and there are people who subtract. True, true. And they want entrepreneurial people who are gonna multiply and add to the culture because culture is their secret weapon. And it’s a secret weapon because it’s hard to replicate, right? We can fly 737s, we can reverse engineer your training process for fly. Oh, yeah. Thrive Nation on today’s show. We are interviewing the man, the myth and the legend, the best selling co author of eight books. He’s a leadership expert, a sought after speaker. He’s the man with a plan and he’s on today’s show. He’s a business. Ladies and gentlemen, Kevin Freiberg. Woo! Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. Two men, eight kids, co-created by two different women, 13 multi-million dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Thriving Time Show. Now, four, two, one, here we go! show on today’s show we are interviewing the legendary best-selling the incredible the wonderful one only mister kevin freiberg. Kevin, how are you, sir? Doing great, Clay, and yourself? Today has been a great day. Today has been a… Every day, I think, as an entrepreneur is an adventure, but we had a lot of wins here, a lot of exciting wins in the Thrive Nation, and you being the pinnacle of the wins, my friend. So thank you for investing part of your time. Thank you. You’re too kind. Well, you… For those of us out there that aren’t familiar, you do these deep dives into what makes organizations and companies successful that are epic. You and your wife work on these books together. And I just want to ask you, when did it occur to you or when did it occur to your wife that you two would team up to become full-time non-fiction business authors? Well, I think a long, long time ago, I hate to say it that way, but I had a passion for being in the speaking business and realized that I didn’t want to just be a motivational speaker, I wanted to do something that had depth and deep background research. Started that and we launched it with a book called Nuts and we just got so busy right away that Jackie left her role at the university and came to work with me and we’ve been doing it really ever since. She just makes me better, so I’m glad she made that choice. When you wrote the book Nuts, the Southwest Airlines crazy recipe for business and personal success, that was I believe in 1997 I believe, in 1997, I believe.