Monetize your Culture with Dennis Ford

• Multifamily Leadership


• 21 Aug 2017

In this interview, Patrick Antrim, CEO of Multifamily Leadership shares time with Dennis Ford who is the Founder and President of Quantum Leap Productions, an  innovative and wildly creative corporate messaging company. With over 25 years experience crafting unique corporate messages, creating  entertaining and relevant videos, and producing myriad original Team Building experiences for over 500,000 corporate employees and Senior  Management, he realized there was a common denominator that every  leader, in every company, talked about but, literally, not one addressed  effectively.

So, after digging into the guts of many Fortune 100 and 500 companies it became his quest to actually solve a problem that every company  faces…how to conceive, create, implement, and nurture a truly positive, effective, and joyful corporate culture. And even more important, how to create a truly profitable culture, one that contributes greatly to both productivity and bottom line revenues…at no cost to the company.

Dennis has written a book about creating a positive, and profitable culture, called “Monetize Your Culture: How to Create a Passionate,  Caring, and Committed Workforce That Actually Increases Your Bottom Line…and Costs You Nothing”. The book is due to be released on  September 10th, 2017.

In his first career, Dennis spent nearly 14 years with CB Richard Ellis, the largest commercial real estate brokerage in the world. After 7 years in sales, he became manager of the Phoenix, AZ office, leading it to #1 status among all CB Richard Ellis offices nationwide, 5 out of 7 years (at the time it was CB Commercial). He was named Senior Vice President, and was the #1 rated sales and negotiating trainer, company wide.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How most corporate meetings run to understand what employees need to hear, understand, and act upon.
• The challenge corporate trainers face in team meetings keeping audience members engaged.
• Quantum Leap productions takes the same message and places the information into a medium that is compelling and memorable.
• What do we go out of our way to see? We visit films, plays, love stories etc. Very few of us seek out speakers.
• Most of the time corporate messages are too detailed.
• Question to the Multifamily Executive – What is it you want people to do differently tomorrow that they did yesterday? What do you want them to think, feel, what do you want them to do that’s different?
• The storyline is not about the marketing plan. The storyline is about the people in the room.

If it’s about me, you have my attention

• Get people laughing about the very thing that might anger them.

You cannot be angry and laughing at the same time

• It’s about the lives of the people in the room. Management’s message become the solution in the context of the story.
• Management’s message needs to become real, relevant, memorable and compelling.
• The genesis of what became Quantum Leap Productions 
• People are talking about the meeting- If they are talking about it means they are present for the meeting which means they remember it and also means “Mission Accomplished”

Our brains don’t selectively decide what we remember

• Don’t change the curriculum, wildly change the delivery.
• Multifamily employee engagement research on corporate culture and communications.
• The Monetize your culture book.
• People talk about culture and don’t understand what it really is. Some miss the power of the relevance to the financial results.
• The Multifamily Executive is the culture

Never in the history of ever has a sales plan or marketing plan had anything to do with culture

• Some executives at the highest level have little idea of what their culture is. Many miss the opportunity and relevance to the bottom line.
• Studies show that people that are happy, joyful, respected will place more into every single day that they work by double digits compared to the people that are disrespected, irrelevant, not appreciated in any way. Sometimes 15%-35% increase in effort. What would that do for your business?
• Culture starts at the top.

Never in the history as ever, has the culture of a company, sports team, organization, started at the bottom. Cultures start at the top and work their way down in a series of expectations, feelings and behaviors.

• People will stay at your company longer because they don’t want to leave a known happy culture.
• Managers should not have ownership over employees.
• The Office Space story
• Every employee in every company has a choice everyday. What is my level of output going to be? What’s the difference between above and beyond and I won’t get fired today? What would happen if all of your employees gave you 15% more effort because they wanted to?

Work to create an intentional culture because it’s good for the bottom line

• How did your culture become your culture? Take a series of steps to create an intentional culture. Start by taking it all in to understand what your current culture is. This is where we start. Then, what do we want to be? Define it. Then over a series of months, you create the culture you want. Open and passionate. Be patient with this process.
• Get rid of behaviors that are producing unfavorable outcomes. Stay committed to the process and protect the new culture from people that’t don’t buy in.
• The Southwest Airlines culture story

If you want to know if it’s a great place to work in Multifamily, you ask the people that work there.

• The story- Everything I learned about business, I learned from waiting tables.

CONNECT with Dennis For

Linkedin: Dennis Ford

On the web: Quantum Leap Productions