#297: Dave Ritterbush, CEO, Califia Farms – Build for what’s next

21:28David Novak:So you have in your career, your marketing roots. You're a marketer at the very core, and it certainly sounds that way. But, you know, building the organizational capability, building the supply chain like you talked about earlier, that's not necessarily something that's associated with marketing people. I mean, how did you pick up those additional skills, or did you always have that? Curiosity. So it's interesting enough. I started as a salesperson. And then, so in dryers, I was a salesperson who was a marketing guy or a marketing guy who was a salesperson. But curiosity. So when we ran a new product that I was involved with, I went to the factory.

22:08And if it was, sometimes they're like, Dave, we're running that product at 1 a.m. Well, I wanted to be there. I wanted to see what did it actually take? So I learned how plants operate at a much greater level of granularity. I learned to spend a lot of time in the R &D department. So I think it was business curiosity that drove it, but I forced myself to have that level of exposure. I didn't assume someone was doing it. I didn't do it because I thought I could do it better, but I just did it because I wanted to learn. And I think the reason I gravitated to marketing, it was the closest thing to general management that existed at that time in my career.

22:45And I could see all the puzzle pieces, but I wanted to see them all come together. So that's how I did a lot of self-teaching, a lot of great relationships with people in other departments. But curiosity was the number one driver.

22:59David Novak:You know, you described yourself as someone who looks for builders when you hire. What does a builder actually look and sound like in an interview? And how do you find him? Tough. It's the toughest thing to find, I think. But in an interview, there's some key questions that I ask, right? The number one is, is there anything in your job that you've just had recently, or maybe could be one job ago, that people refer to as, let's say I'm interviewing Mary. Oh, that's the Mary spreadsheet. That's the Mary process. And that you created something that didn't exist before or that you're acknowledged for it.

23:42And so that's a builder. A builder comes in and sees things and they build upon them, right, as opposed to managers. The other question is you can tell a builder by somebody who's taken, I don't think it's real risk, but people perceive it as personal risk, personal accountability. Hey, I saw this. There wasn't this happening. I brought this forward, made this recommendation, made that recommendation. And then the other thing is if you know companies, builders tend to be very frustrated working where there's bureaucracy, where that kind of desire to change is hit with too great of a resistance force to change things.

24:22And that's why they're out looking for a job. You can always find them because they've done it before, but if they have it and they're coming straight out of a bigger organization that's known to be more process-oriented, you sense and feel their real frustration of not being able to make personal impact.

24:36David Novak:So what's the question you ask yourself before you hire somebody? I've changed. I'm getting old now. But if I'm hiring someone I'm working with, I just realize I want to like them. Like, they can be very different. We don't have to be friends. But I want to work with them. There's something about that that's interesting to them and interesting to me. And the interview is more like a conversation than Q &A back and forth. When I'm interviewing more broadly, when I first came into the company, Just to get my hand on, I interviewed every new employee. And it wasn't a control thing, although maybe I'll be accused of that.

25:12But I wanted to validate that we're all looking for the right people. So when I'm interviewing something more broadly, that maybe they're not going to work directly with me, I want somebody who wants to read our annual report and feel like their fingerprint is somewhere in there.

25:31David Novak:You know, can you tell me a time, and you mentioned how hard it is. It's very hard to find these builders, but can you tell me about a time when you got it wrong and you hired someone who looked like a builder that wasn't? What behavior did they have? I think my biggest mistakes have come when I heard the right words, but I didn't have proof of the action. So I've made that mistake a couple of times. And I'm going to say in an organization, you don't need everyone to be builders. That probably would be too chaotic, but you need them in the right places. And I was at a point where, in a different company, where we needed to have someone come in from our operations.

26:10We're going to be making a lot of changes to our manufacturing of a structure. And they said all the right things, but their background probably wouldn't have provided me the proof points. And so I fell victim for the, I said the right things, but I didn't have the right examples to reinforce it.

26:30David Novak:Hello, friends. I hope you're loving this conversation. Be sure to stay tuned to the very end of the episode. As always, David and I are going to debrief some of the concepts that he talks about with this week's guest. So stay tuned to the very end, and I will see you soon. I want to, you know, get back to your leadership at Calafia, but I want to take you back, you know, way back. And tell me a story from your childhood that shaped the kind of leader you are today. So I'm the youngest of three, and there's a big age gap. So my oldest brother was 12 years. My other brother was seven and a half years.

27:08My father came from, you know, really nothing, from a farm in Nebraska and moved his way out west. And by the time I was, you know, in sixth grade, seventh grade, I started to travel with my father because, heck, my mom wanted to go to some of these conferences, And I really, I spent a lot of time with my dad and seeing how he interacted with his employees and his teamwork and just who he was as a person around business. And I think that was probably, that was probably the impetus of why I became so passionate. And that's, I use that term. It's a hobby for me. It's a passion. It's my job. I think because I kind of grew up, instead of tagging along with my brother going to a baseball game, I kind of tagged along with my dad going to work things.

27:55David Novak:Yeah, I love that. And I also understand you're a little bit of an entrepreneur. You had your own paper route when you were 12 years old. What was the biggest lesson that taught you? Boy, you had deep research. Well, it taught me that I don't want to have a job that's 365 days a year. I mean, I remember waking up on Christmas morning and it was the morning route too. And there was no successor. So, you know, I had to deliver that paper. Boy, my phone was ringing off the hook because they knew your number. So, but you know what? It taught me hard work. I mean, it taught me that you got to do things for yourself.

28:30You know, they dropped off a bundle of papers and a bag of rubber bands and you folded them up and that was your responsibility. And you realize that if you didn't show up, you were letting a lot of people down.

28:42David Novak:You spent 16 years at Dreyer's and great company. And over time, you became the youngest person on the executive team. What did you have to do to earn your seat at the table when you were so much younger than everyone else? So I just never, my aspirations was maybe one day I could get a vice president title like my dad had. So I didn't have this goal of trying to be a CEO, but I just was so competitive to want to, I want to do the best I could do, not just for myself, but I loved it there. I met my wife there. I met some of my closest friends there. It was a family. And I guess I was driven by just wanting to do well for myself and everyone else.

29:33But I would say how I got there is I wasn't afraid to take risks. I'll never forget the time I was pretty reasonably junior. And I just disagreed with the CEO. And he was a legend. I mean, he's Gary Rogers. And I took him on, not in a confrontational way, but in really expressing my ideas and why I thought this was different. And I just thought that's what you're supposed to do, right? You're here to do what you think is the right thing. And I think it was that willingness and ability to take risk, personal risk, take personal accountability, call it when you got it wrong, but also try to change things.

30:06And so I did a lot of things that I was fortunate enough worked out for me, but was willing to say, great, if it's bad, put it on me. I'm willing to shoulder that.

30:19David Novak:You know, as I understand it, drivers had what they called a grooves-based management system. Sounds interesting to me. Explain what the heck that is. We had 10 grooves. So you could call them values or principles, the same words would be interchange. And that's, it was how we truly ran the company. And at one point, we had to change this at the very end. We didn't have an HR department, because one of our groups was managers should manage. And what our leaders found is that if you have, if you separate management, and when things get tough, you hand it off to someone else, that's not really being a manager.

30:56It's a very important role now. I have an amazing person that runs HR and a whole team because there's a lot of technical complexities. But I still believe managers should manage. You should have the hard conversation. You should be the one developing. You should take accountability for career development. There were 10 grooves like that. We had ready, fire, aim instead of ready, aim, fire. That meant you better get things ready. Don't just go out there firing away. But go ahead and take the risk. Figure you'll aim it later. You'll improve it. That was that speed thing that was taught. But those grooves are so important to me that everywhere I went, what it really was back then, you didn't talk about so much, but they created a culture that was motivating, retentive, and empowering.

31:39And I think I've tried to sum them up in my own words. I didn't agree with all of them. But everywhere I've gone, the first thing I do is find a language for us to capture the values of it that will drive the culture. Because how you win is as important as what you win.

31:54David Novak:Tell me one of those. Tell me what you think would be the most important one at Califia. Passion for purpose. I think passion is really important. And I think we're a purpose-driven company. And so I think we want to have people that have a passion about what we're trying to do, both from a business objective, a health for people objective, a health for the planet objective. I judge that by how many people walk around wearing our shirts or a hat or a logo. Like, they want to wear the brand out and really be prideful of where they work from that. But a challenger mind spit is also another one. It says, you know, we're here to be disruptors.

32:34And so I try to find those, some of which are not fully there. And so you have to develop and cultivate them. Some are inherent in the organization you walk into. But the most important thing for me to culture is find a common language. because if you say teamwork and I say interdependency and someone else says no silos, yes, you've all said the same thing, but it's so much more powerful. If you walked into our organization, we all say we're fiercely interdependent. All three people answer it that way. That common language really, and the words matter, really cements that this is something important and I feel a sense of it and everyone says the same thing.

33:13So I think creating a language and creating those values are one of the first things you have to do as a leader coming into our organization.

33:20David Novak:Why do words matter so much? There's a big word between the word fiercely in front of interdependent changes the whole meaning. Teamwork, I feel, has been overused. So there's my example of that. But also, even when you get into technical things, I want to make sure you and I are actually talking about the same thing. How many times do you see people in a conversation where they actually are in agreement, but they're just missing slightly different definitions of things. So when I look at it, I think on the things that really matter, us all having that common language creates a sense of unity.

33:58David Novak:You were the CEO, as we mentioned earlier, of Quest, and you've sold businesses. And Quest was acquired for a billion dollars under your leadership. What did going through that process teach you about actually creating value in a business? Well, it's humbling. Selling a company is very humbling because you're not used to talking to seven people and having four say they're not interested. So that's the first part. I think what it really taught me is the first thing any large corporation is going to do is say, why can't we do this ourselves? And so you have to have things built in that are, I call it the special sauce, that you walk in and people realize, well, there's something about this, whether that's the way in which you interact with your consumers, it might be an approach to product development.

34:53You have to have some things that are uniquely yours. Because if what you have is simply their playbook done on a smaller scale, in the build or buy, you'll always lose. They'll build. And so you have to have created something about that. And I think that is a sense of, at some levels of finding what you're going to be really excellent at and doing it in a unique way. And then I think the second thing comes back to culture, that the people there feel different in a sense of the connectivity of the product and the brand and the purpose of what the company's about.

35:26David Novak:Dave, what would you describe as your biggest leadership moment at Calafia? Yeah. I don't know if, I don't know if there's any one moment. I think it's about showing up every day for me. Like I don't, I'd love to, it's a such a good question, but I think at the end, I've always not looking for one stand on the rooftop and make a speech. I think it's about how you show up in every meeting. And, and I hope, right, that it'll be a series of one-off moments of sitting down in a meeting with the brand management team or having, you know, gone to the midnight shift and served them dinner near the holidays to thank them.

36:07If I were to say it, I think it's the way we entered the company, right? It was during the pandemic. We decided to have a virtual cooking class and we had to get people all the supplies. So we had them come, and this is when you still, you know, you're masked up, you couldn't get out of your car. They showed up and me and my team stood there. We loaded their trunks and our CFO will kill me. I made them wear a little sandwich board that said free window washing. And then we watched every single employee's windows as we loaded their trunk before we got on Zoom that night. And I think that was a moment where I said, I'm coming here to be with you.

36:43I'm not coming here. I want to be a part of what we're doing. I'm not here to be anything other than a part of the team.

36:51David Novak:What behaviors do you really aggressively and actively try to recognize? I really try to recognize people that have shown self-initiative, people that have seen an opportunity, created a solution, and then acted upon it. So I think that's probably the one I want to do. And then the second one is I want to acknowledge people that have built collaboration, a team, have created something that involved an activity even bigger than themselves. And those people had humility about it, were quick to recognize the role of the different team members and how it came together as a collective effort. How do you go about making people feel valued at every level, whether they're vice president or they're on the manufacturing line?

37:42First of all, we institute a peer recognition system. So on our intercompany website, there's a very quick way I can acknowledge people who have demonstrated the way in which they work that's core to one of our values. So I think people see recognition very publicly. I hold a town hall every month. We show that screen of everyone who's been recognized. I think that we literally put everyone on the same. 70 % of everyone's bonus is the exact same as mine, is the exact same as everyone through the whole organization. It's about teamwork. There's plenty of room for individual, which we have in our goal setting, but structurally the bonus is that way.

38:21I also think transparency is another way. It sounds odd that you would connect those, but people really feel appreciated and engaged when they know what their role is in the whole system. So, for example, as soon as someone joins our company at any level, they go through what we call Camp Calafia. Two half-day sessions where they understand the workings of each one of our departments. so they see, as we say, how we go from almond to consumer. I want them to know those roles so that they have that sense that everything that everyone does in this company is critical and is important to our overall success.

38:56David Novak:You know, AI is obviously the hot topic these days. What are you learning at Calafee about AI that other leaders can apply to their own business? Oh, you learn something every day. In fact, I literally just came from a meeting where we were talking about AI. I think what we've tried to do with AI in our company is the first place we put it was on productivity tools. So our supply chain team. We've had a mantra here. And it's easy. We don't, the size of our company allows me to do this. But we said we're not going to use AI to replace you. We're going to use AI to make you better. And what that has done is it's created the, it's removed the barrier of fear.

39:38and it's enabled everyone. So we put ChatGPT, co-pilot on every single person's computer. We have coffee work sessions on how people can share what they've done. And I think we've reinforced that we're here to use it to make us all better. Now it may prevent us from hiring, the need to hire someone in the future. But I think we've tried, that I would say is, we've tried to create a culture around AI that is one of safe space where I can look at and research how AI can help my job and not worry about it taking my job.

40:11David Novak:Yeah, so how do you do that when AI can be so productive and save time? I mean, how can you really say that to someone? Because it's easy in a growth company. Because when you're growing 20 % a year, I think imagine just the P &L, you ran brilliant companies. If I grow 20 % a year and I never have to hire another person, and if you say world class is 5 % to 10 % turnover, and I never have to replace some of those jobs, I can fundamentally never have to hire another employee. You could call that job replacement, which it is, but it's not replacing a current employee's job that is where they want to be that's not there tomorrow.

40:49David Novak:Yeah, growth solves all kinds of problems, doesn't it? That's why I love, it goes back to my first statement. I love growth. And personally, how are you using AI and other tools to keep leveling up your leadership? I think in two big ways. I'm using ChatGPT to get ready for a meeting. I have a commodities meeting. I plug in what our core commodities are and a quick summary of what's going on from that standpoint. So I think it helps me better prepare myself to engage in deeper discussion so I'm not just hearing headlines. We can now start talking about deeper-rooted subjects within that. And then, you know, listen, I'm using it for my own personal efficiency, whether our co-pilot can help start takeover and start to auto-draft a response.

41:31So it's trying to, I'm using it as a way to take out time of doing things that are kind of not value added to create more time for value added activities.

41:42David Novak:Dave, this has been a lot of fun and I want to have some more with my lightning round of questions. So are you ready for this? All right, let's go. The three words that best describe you? Intense, empathetic, hopefully humble. If you could be one person for a day besides yourself, who would it be? I would love to be Tim Cook to run Apple computers for a day. Your biggest pet peeve? People who don't bring something up in a meeting. I call it The Emperor Wears No Clothing. And then tells their friends afterwards what a disaster that idea was. Who would play you in a movie? Jeff Bridges. You've been continuously employed since the age of 12 or 13.

42:20David Novak:What's the job you'd least want to go back to? A paper route. Very monotonous. What's something you've been curious about lately that has absolutely nothing to do with work? So I got two beehives and I'm now obsessed with bees. The one thing you do just for you? I read before I go to bed every night. Besides your family and friends, what's your most prized possession? My outdoor barbecue. If I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear? Probably something from the 80s, hopefully Billy Joel. What's something about you that few people would know besides the bee passion? Yeah, you know, I think probably most, I have a really hard time saying no.

43:00I'm a massive over-committer.

43:03David Novak:What's one of your daily rituals, something that you never miss? Reading the news in the morning. I think the first thing I do is try to catch up on what's happening in the world before I have to start my own day. All right, we're out of the lightning round. Just a few more questions and I'll let you get back to your hobby here. You've sold a lot of companies and you've got Calathea and it's private. Are you, you know, the million dollar question or billion-dollar question or whatever it is. Are you building Calafia to sell? I'm personally building Calafia for the long term. I mean, it's not a house I'll live in forever.

43:38But whoever does it, I want them to have a business that is built for a long term. I don't want to see it just be a transactional thing. And however, if we were to do something, I would hope that it brings more resources to the company and gives it even a greater chance to grow and thrive.

43:58David Novak:You know, you've turned down opportunities more than once because they required you to move your family. Tell me about the hardest one you've ever had to walk away from. There's been some great food companies that I've had an opportunity to work for in the Midwest that I wish I would have done. I think the hardest thing I've done is I still, my office is in L.A. and I live in Northern California. So probably the hardest thing was getting on a plane 50 weeks a year to come down to work. How do you think about leaving at home, Dave? What do you try to do with your family? I try with my family to be incredibly close.

44:35I have this saying that we toast every dinner. We have more than a few people together. And it says, make your family your friends and make your friends your family. And I think that is probably the core to who I want to be. And so I try to live and demonstrate that by really having a parental role, but a friendship role. My kids are now, they're adults. I count them as some of my best friends. And I count some of my best friends as my family.

45:02David Novak:Back to Califia. If Califia were a book, what chapter would you say you're writing today? It's so funny that you gave that one. I literally, I always think of a company as a book. And I just told a company that we just started the fifth chapter. And so the fifth chapter that we're in is really all about maturity. So, you know, and what we're really about is creating the next Califia 2.0, the next future of growth. Last question here. What's one piece of advice you'd give to anyone who wants to be a better leader? It's always about the people. I've walked into too many companies, companies that are declining 15%.

45:44And yes, there were some structural things, but at the end of the day as a leader, it's all about the people. It's who you put around you and how you motivate them that will be the success.

45:56David Novak:Well, Dave, you obviously have had a lot of it, and so you know what you're talking about. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to be on this show. I appreciate it very much. Dave, it was really great to have this conversation with you. Thanks so much.

46:14David Novak:David, I got to tell you, as a non-dairy milk girl, I really enjoyed this episode, learning about Calafia Farms and all that Dave is up to. Are you an almond milk person, an oat milk person? I'm an oat milk person. Oat milk's taking over. I remember when almond milk came on, everybody, oh, that doesn't taste that good. Now, that's all everybody drinks. I mean, when was the last time you had real milk? I actually was thinking about it, listening to you and Dave talk, and I don't think I can remember when that, when the last time I had real, real dairy milk is. It's been a while, you know. I like some really good chocolate milk though, every now and then, you know, that's pretty good.

46:53David Novak:I know you do. You mentioned that, the chocolate milk bandit. There we go. Well, David, I'm excited to get your take on some of the concepts that you and Dave talked about in the episode so that our listeners have something really practical they can take away and apply to their own leadership and to their own life, because that's really what we're all about with this podcast. And specifically with this debrief, the first concept, David, that I want to debrief with you is this idea of building ahead. Dave talks about building your company's infrastructure and processes for the future, not for the present.

47:26David Novak:He says, we can never let the company be the reason we slow down growth. What are some practical ways, David, that leaders can do this effectively? Well, I've always believed that you really have to create, first of all, a future-backed vision. Get together with yourself and your team and really identify what you think the future is going to look like. And then you have to say, okay, if that's where the world is heading, what are the key strategies we're going to have? And then how do we structure around it with our resources and people so that we can truly execute those strategies so that we can lead the way in the future.

48:07And then at the same time,

48:10David Novak:really think about your culture and ask yourself, what cultural behaviors are we going to have to have to really make sure that we're prepared for the future? Like now, obviously AI is the big craze. And all the CEOs that I talk to that are really focused on AI are now building in a cultural behavior of curiosity and asking questions with their teams. So they want people to be able to ask chat GBT good questions so they can get not just the run of the mill answer, because the better question you ask, the better input you're going to get. So, you know, create a future-backed vision, then, you know, develop the strategies that are going to get you there and make sure that you lead versus get behind, then structure behind it, and then make sure that you have the cultural behaviors embedded in your organization that are going to make sure you win down the road.

49:04David Novak:I love that idea of a future-backed vision, David. Can you give some just practical tips around what that future-backed vision really looks like? Or maybe an example from your time at Yum? Well, I think, you know, we were pretty much a one-day part company. And, you know, so in other words, you know, pizza was good for dinner. Taco Bell was good for lunch. KFC was good for dinner. And, you know, the future-backed vision we had was we needed to really leverage our asset, you know, throughout the day. And we also needed to provide more meaningful variety. So we literally thought about the business in terms of creating concept layers.

49:42David Novak:Like we didn't have desserts at all our businesses. So we were going to do desserts. We didn't have breakfast. You know, certainly at Taco Bell, we needed to have that to really compete with McDonald's. You know, so we didn't have value menus, you know, all around the world. So we always wanted to make sure we had really great value. So we basically created a sales layer vision of how we could really leverage our asset 24-7 throughout the day and develop the products and the extensions that would allow us to get more sales down the road. And that's what we geared our future towards. And that's how I think we were able to really drive sustainable same-store sales growth for so many years.

50:27David Novak:Another concept that I thought was super interesting that Dave talked about in this conversation was this idea of first-day naivete. And I always kind of smile when I say that because it sounds like a little jingle. But this idea of first-day naivete is a good way for all leaders to remember the importance of looking at things with fresh eyes and really questioning the status quo. What ways can leaders incorporate this type of practice into their business and into their teams? I think, number one, you've got to listen to what comes out of your mouth many times. Sometimes, you know, I've heard people say, well, that's not the way how we do it around here.

50:59David Novak:Well, that means you've got this embedded process that's going to keep people from trying new things because, hey, this is the way we do it at this particular company. And this is the way how it's going to be. And I think that stifles creativity and stifles fresh thinking. Well, I had an exercise which I absolutely loved. It was called Hotshot Replaces Me. And every now and then I would say, hey, if somebody came in and took my job and they came in first thing and they looked at everything that was going on in the business, what would they do? What would they see? And what would they act upon?

51:39David Novak:And so I would do the same thing. And I'd ask myself, if I came in day one, what would I see? And it really forced me to step back, to find reality in terms of the way how the business is. And then I would develop an action plan to make sure that we acted upon what I basically was seeing with those fresh eyes. Because the reason is, Kula, I really love my job. And I didn't want some hot shot to come in and take it. So I figured if I kept acting like a hotshot, and I mean that in the most positive sense, somebody who's really talented that could come in and look at the business with a fresh set of eyes and do what they would do because they would identify the real challenges and opportunities to grow the business, there's no way I wouldn't be successful.

52:27David Novak:So I love that hotshot replaces me exercise. That's so good. I thought, listening to this part of the conversation about this thing that you've said a couple times, which is you can only be green once. So if you're entering into a new job, then really take advantage of being green and not being deeply ingrained into systems that have been there for forever. And really question the status quo. And, you know, when you are in a new environment, I think it's so important to do just that, to actually have that first day naivete and really lean into questioning things. Yeah, and I may have stated it incorrectly when I said you're only green once.

53:03David Novak:Yeah, you are only new once. There's no question. advantage, that gives you an advantage to come in and to take a sharp look at it. And then what happens with a lot of leaders is once they've been there for a while, they start to get defensive and start defending why you do things the way you need to do. And that's the worst thing that can happen. So I think if I was going to rephrase it now, I'd say, you got to find a way as a leader to be evergreen. You know, always be fresh, always look at the business with new eyes and And don't be defensive and don't let the ways that you've ingrained in your company keep you from forging new territory.

53:42David Novak:David, the last concept that I thought was super interesting in this conversation is the idea of hiring builders. Dave talks about how he hires builders, people who are proactive problem solvers. They're creating their own systems. They do things in the company that make people say, oh, that's the Mary spreadsheet. Mary built that spreadsheet and now we use it and that's the Mary spreadsheet. So this idea of builders, I'm curious, David, how do you spot a builder? What would you look for in people to make sure that they are builders when you're trying to hire them? Well, number one, I ask people for examples of where they've had step change thinking, where they've looked at a business and really thought outside the dots and come up with ways to really grow it in a dramatic fashion.

54:23David Novak:So, you know, I want somebody who can really think in bold ways and then drive execution to really make it happen. The second thing is I always look for know-how builders because the know-how builders are real learners, and they're seeking knowledge wherever they can get it. They don't care where it comes from, but they're just trying to get better, make sure that their team's better, make sure their brand's better, make sure their company's better. And they want to learn, and they try to learn from the best. So I look for know-how builders. And then the third thing is that you can't build any business without great people.

55:00David Novak:So I look for people who had a demonstrated track record for being people growers. So, you know, step change thinkers, know-how builders, people growers, you know, those three things really, I think, help you, you know, hire people that can really build your company for the future. Well, Dave's done that throughout his entire career. I mean, he did it at Dreyer's and now he's doing it at Calafia. And so, you know, when you choose a type of behavior that you want to hire for and then that cascades across your entire company, then three years down the road, you look at your company and say, oh my gosh, this is why we are where we are today because of all of the builders that I've hired owning their own piece of the company and really being proactive and solving problems.

55:39David Novak:Yeah. And they have what I always talk about is a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo. You know, they don't want things to stay the same. They want things to get better day in and day out. And you want that kind of building mentality and the people that you have in your company. David, as we wrap this episode today, what do you want people to leave this conversation really thinking about? I think number one, get prepared for the future and define what you think your future back vision is, and then make sure you're structured with the people organization to really make it happen. Number two, you remember the importance of staying evergreen, you know, having fresh eyes when you take a look at things.

56:18David Novak:I think my Hot Shot Replaces Bee exercise is really, really phenomenal. And I encourage you to do it today. And number three, you know, to grow, you have to hire builders, you have to have the people capability to really get you there. And you know, I talked about the three things I look for step change thinking, know how builders and people growers, and maybe maybe that'll help you too. Awesome. Well, David, thank you so much for another excellent episode of How Leaders Lead. Thanks to Dave Ritterbush for joining our show. And thank you, of course, to you, our listeners. Tune in next Thursday and we will see you soon.