2441 - Building Human-Centered Companies Through the Power of Presence with Guild Collective's Justin Ricklefs

0:03Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If you're committed to growing your business by serving audiences with generosity and real expertise, you're in the right place. This is a daily 15 minute show featuring leaders who believe real impact comes from generosity, not hype, which means as a listener, you're going to get the good stuff. In fact, we created podverified.com to give thoughtful leaders like you free tools to show up better on podcast stages, like this one. That includes your free PodVerified score, free PodVerified guest training, a free media kit builder, and so much more. It's the first ecosystem of its kind built by podcasters who genuinely want to help guests thrive and grow in podcasting.

0:46Visit podverify.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it.

0:56with us right now it's justin rickliffe justin you are the founder and ceo of guild collective you were found on the web at guild collective.com justin it's great to have you oh man i'm honored josh thanks for having me and i wish we were together in florida actually not here in kansas city but uh it's good to be with you on online at least yeah kansas city's a great town you got the world cup coming into town and uh kansas city's going to be on on the world stage for a moment. So, but, but you know, Justin, you know, I, you and I were kind of talking beforehand and I always, you know, kind of start off our conversations on the thoughtful entrepreneur, kind of talking about I love learning what high level leaders do for fun or what they're kind of passionate about when they're not at work and you and I share the, and I'm very recent to this for, for a couple of reasons, but do you mind sharing kind of like what you've been doing when you're not at work uh that it's feels it's it's anyway i'll let you i don't want to steal your thunder well i don't know if it's thunder or makes me weird but i guess it might make two of us weird but i've yeah i've entered the bird watching era of my life and and it's just it's a it's a honestly one of my the favorite parts of my day is waking up a little bit before everybody else in the house going on a long walk and then coming back to our we've got a screened in porch on our in our house and we come to the back of the house sit on the screen and porch i do a little bit of journaling gratitude some prayers some of some of that kind of spiritual core stuff and then we've got about seven bird houses kind of littered around the corner of our uh our back deck and and they all are there the woodpeckers and we we don't get a ton of bluebirds but when the bluebirds come that's amazing lately the indigo buntings have shown up uh which is a wild bird it's as it's as vibrant blue as you can imagine anyway i'm in my i feel like the mall walkers and the bird watchers got it right and i've made fun of those two people for a long long time when i was younger and now i'm like wait that's me and so anyway that's uh that's a little bit of maybe where where we can jump in oh my gosh i'm looking at this i'm looking at uh photos of this indigo bunting you're right that is a really beautiful vibrant blue my gosh now i they're insane i would love to see that we um woodpeckers we we have one that's a uh is i know it's a red crested but it's just got this beautiful um uh scout or cowl or of uh yeah you know this um what's what's the color it's a peachy it's a peachy and it's really beautiful and vibrant yeah they're they're favorite that we get here in orlando you know but so what i'm going to point out here is uh it It doesn't sound, Justin, like in that moment, you're not hustling and grinding.

3:43What's going on? Oh, yeah, I think I think the the hustle and grind season of my life is I mean, there's still that tendency and you wake up on Monday and you feel this compulsion to push and produce and do the thing. And of course, like hard work's always going to be part of it. But it is. And there is a longer story to this if we want to go there. But last July, my life, I was so exhausted. I was tired. I was compressed. I was, you know, running from that place of franticness that probably looked fine from the outside. But inside, I was just this interior exhaustion and depletion, really. And I went on a two-day silent retreat at this Catholic monastery.

4:28I'm not even Catholic. But it reset and reframed this different posture. And I'm in process on this. I've not arrived at any destination, but this process of receiving, this process of presence, this process of stillness and slowness and, and frankly, like a sharper, more sophisticated way of showing up in the world, as opposed to this, like, man, I'm so freaking scared and I'm just going to push and hustle and grind to death. and and my life's better man like my relationship with my wife's better my relationship with my kids is better my uh connection to our team and our clients and the work is is is more acute and and present and anyway i i the hustle piece is is uh it's a dangerous drug man and i took it you know for a long long time and i'm still a recovering hustling grinder Ben, they're done that, my friend.

5:25And, you know, you know, especially as you rise to higher levels of leadership, you know, the the quality of the seconds and minutes that you invest when you need to be on when it really matters. You know, that's what differentiates a great leader from an OK leader is, you know, how did they show up in that 10 minutes that really mattered, you know, in front of that key partner or prospect or, you know, or, you know, shareholders or, you know, whatever it is. So you're absolutely right. You know, or at least I, you know, I have this experience of I take my downtime very seriously. um social media does not you know it it doesn't get entrance in into my fortress of solitude time but my koi fish out back they do they get my full attention for 10 minutes you know it's just 10 minutes but i pop a chair back there and i'm just like yes look at the fish i'm gonna look at watch the turtles uh you know if a bird comes by you know uh you know yes that too um but there's this you know, this, this sense of awe and humility that, that, that comes in and I just feel part of a bigger world.

6:40And I, you know, it's also integration time, you know, if our brains are constantly go, go, go, go, go, go, you know, it's almost like, you know, the difference between, you know, you know, praying where we're just talking, doing all the talking and then praying where we're doing more listening. So it's like, for me, it's, you know, it's the time for me to listen to my own inner consciousness during that time. See what comes up completely, you know, there's not a lot of intention other than just like, I'm going to be at peace right now. Man, I just want to ask you this one more question about the two-day silence retreat.

7:20How challenging was that? Or were there moments of that where it was very hard? Yes, to all. It was a remarkable experience. I don't know a way to describe it in a concise way, but it was this, it really did shift something in my life. And the way that I can try to walk into it is, it was actually such a damn relief to not have a phone, to not have a laptop, to not have the, even responsibility of these you know, small talk conversations with people that you're not hype with or close with, right? And so there's safety for me and surface level conversations of like, oh, yeah, hey, what do you do?

8:06What's your story? How are you? Right? And again, that's not bad. And there's a place for that. But what I found was, I was an outsider, not Catholic. And they were the most hospitable, wonderful people and then i'm forced to encounter this new system that i don't have all of my kind of traditional way of doing things i can't i can't pull up claude and be like hey what's the monastic lifestyle give me the you know i can't yeah you just have to be in mystery 100 100 and in silence and even as as basic humanity of sitting across from a man i didn't know at the breakfast table and watching him how he cracked his hard-boiled egg and opened his egg and poured salt on it.

8:54And there's just silence. And I'm like, man, dude, like this is, it's crazy. And so all of it to say, yes, there were challenging parts for sure. Even as simple as like, I don't know what time it is. And we have to be at Vespers at 7.15 a.m. Because at that point in time, I didn't wear a watch. Now I do. And because we just, we rely so much on the phone, right? To not have it felt initially kind of weird. I was kind of like a junkie. I was reaching for it. And then it took a couple hours and I was like this big exhale. And all this stuff came to the surface. Honestly, I cried longer in those 48 hours than I have in years and years and years.

9:38It surprised me. And I think my body was just expressing it. It was just like a sweat gland. It was just expressing these emotions that I'd kind of like, just like pressed in, you know. And it was such a delight though. It was an experience. Everything was vibrant. Everything was bright. Everything was visible. Everything was really clear and present. And it really did. It really did change me and shift me and helped reorder. I think the biggest kind of takeaway that I've written about a little bit publicly is my priorities weren't wrong, but they were misordered. and to watch how the monks live this very ordered life.

10:20And for that, like I couldn't do what they do, right? But I had such reverence for their rigor and their fidelity and their order. They just prioritize the same thing over and over and over. And as an entrepreneur, and especially as one that's an Enneagram seven, I'm kind of like all over the place. I'm like, oh, shiny thing. Let's do new things. Let's do things built. It was just like, oh, no, no, no, no. the priorities are right here. They need to be ordered. And so for me, it's now, it's faith, and then my own fitness, my, you know, soul fitness, physical fitness, emotional fitness, all that, then my family, then finances, and then friends.

10:57And I'm hopeful as I continue to get older and more mature that the, that the friends thing pops up over the finances bucket. But right now, like, that's the practical order of my life. And that's a long answer to your awesome question. But it was a stunning experience to see how much silence really shaped and reordered and surfaced things in me that were so, some hard, but some really, really, really good. Man, that is so valuable. Thank you so much for sharing your experience with that. And yeah, I'm truly inspired by it. But we got to talk about Guild Collective. Tell me about the work that you do, Justin.

11:30it's been it's been a 10-year journey towards clarity and and I feel like we're at this we just left yesterday our quarterly business review and as a team we're at this point where we've we've we've taken I know you've had so many awesome leaders on your show so a lot of this is just like jumping on their backs and saying the same story but as an entrepreneur I started here and I was like oh we can do this and this and this we can serve you in this way. And we had all of these, you know, awesome, but like capabilities and products and different ways we were trying to frankly make money. And as we've been in the room with CEOs, owners, CMOs, people making significant decisions about their brand over the years, we've just started to shrink that focus into this like one system.

12:20And the system we talk about is how to build a human first brand and and that's comprised of three core vital signals and one activity so the vital signals are is it clear is it connected and is it creative and then ultimately are you committed to that piece and so like a x y axis is like high purpose you know is in the north star can we help a brand identify and live out their purpose and then is it integrated You used that word earlier. And it's like, yes, that's what we're talking about from a brand standpoint. Because everybody has experienced those times when we did this meaningful work, like in a boardroom.

13:01And then it got stuck in a PDF somewhere or a Google Drive or a Dropbox folder. And it didn't get integrated into the recruiting, the onboarding, the culture, the growth and development on the internal side. And then on the external side, our clients get disconnected. And so then our clients aren't delighted. We don't have a clear plan for how do we market, sell, deliver, grow, right? And so the work we are invited into with leaders these days is this really beautiful, we talk about it being the brand heartbeat, the business strategy typically lives in the head of the business, but then the heart gets to express how that brand shows up inside first, because all healthy companies, they're healthy inside first.

13:48They don't market themselves to growth. And it's an expression. Growth is an outcome, as my friend Corey Shear says. Growth is not the strategy. And so anyway, at Guild, that's what we're up to is we're helping them discover their heartbeat and then have that heartbeat be integrated from the inside of their business all the way to the outside world. There is so much development and copy and, you know, communication that's happening and creative content that's being shared on the web. And, you know, it's AI created. And I think it's wonderful. It's, you know, the tools that we're getting are exciting and, you know, allow us to output so much more But given that context, Justin, you know, based on everything that's going on right now, why is it more important than ever to be a human first brand?

14:50Because, again, we're pro-AI, right? We're not anti-AI, but we're pro-human connection. and it's how much of a signal is it to connect first to the humans in the business. And as simple as that sounds to say, what leaders end up typically doing is, oh, we're going to add more stuff. We got to be busier. We got to hustle. We got to add this new AI problem. What if we add an AI customer service chat? Which again, none of these things are bad, but they're almost like putting plywood up on the top of a dam when the pressure in the water is rising. My friend Corey shared told us that story yesterday.

15:30And people that put plywood up don't deal with the actual systemic issue in the reservoir itself. The pressure is building for leaders in ways that are honestly really exhausting and scary. But the work is to take all that water pressure and create a system that allows it to flow as opposed to just like putting up all these external kind of band-aids of quote unquote marketing, right? And we see it all over the place. It's like, oh, we should make sure we show up in AI search and we should make sure that we have a TikTok strategy and we should buy some more Google ads because people are ultimately, the core human emotion is like, we're afraid that the old ways aren't gonna work anymore.

16:14But the work, the required work of the leader and the leadership team is to get tight and small and simple. in ways that the story itself can become the generative engine towards the team, number one, and then to the client experience, number two. And there's at scale, it's happening with, let's pick a brand like Carvana. Carvana has gone all in on how do we disrupt the industry so that we don't make buying a car a scary, intimidating, annoying experience where we get strong-armed and bad copped, right? That's just a not, it's a terrible way to live. We bought a car from Carvana a few weeks ago and they, we shopped online.

17:00We have a seven day money back guarantee if we don't like it. The woman who delivered the car was proud to work for Carvana. She loved the equipment and she made the experience in our front yard a delight and they're crushing it from a financial perspective. They're, they're, they're destroying it. They're doing really, really well. And then you take it all the way down to like the small, you know, tiny local restaurant. When you prioritize the human experience, when people love working at the place, and when people are delighted to buy from the place, the business flourishes. It sounds simple to say, right?

17:35But that's the work is like, oh, can we prioritize the human connection? And if the team loves working here, and if the client is, it has a delightful experience, the business grows. And again, it's not always that simple, but that is the road.

17:53So how do we build a human-first brand internally? So with our teams, and I know it's kind of a big question. Oh, by the way, do you have a hard stop in two minutes? Or can you go? I'm good if you're good. I actually, let me just verify. I get a little behind the scenes. Hey, podcast editor, just go ahead and keep this in. This is real, real. Yeah, I do have an open spot. I'm good if you're good. Yeah, because I need to ask you about this. And that is, again, developing a human first culture on the inside. Because if we can get it right on the inside, then everything we do on the outside will be a reflection of how our culture operates.

18:38You don't have to fake it, right? So you don't have to, you know, kind of plaster these inspirational posters on the exterior, you know, to convey, oh, yes, you know, here, we're a family, you know, it just like, you know, so what are those things that, you know, the good best practices that we as leaders can do within our groups? Yeah. We have a process we call the human first brand blueprint, and it's seven core pieces in the framework. And I'll walk through that here in a second. But in its most practical sense is really thinking about a human first brand on the inside of the business as four things.

19:19Is do we have clarity? Clarity is freaking hard. It's easy to be busy, confusing, try a bunch of stuff. But it's like, what's the one single purpose that we, why do we exist? Get clear on that answer. We asked a huge CEO, big business, a brand we want to work with so bad. And they invited us into this workshop. And the CEO, I kept asking him, I was like, yeah, but why do you guys exist? What's the purpose? And he got defensive and angry, ultimately, because he didn't have an answer to that. and and I wasn't being provocative on purpose I was trying to get him to articulate his why and and they don't have those answers they've got vision statements they've got well we did this values work and like those again those aren't bad things but if we just simplify it down to why do we exist do the people who work at our place know why we do this and if the answer is unclear it's confusion it's the opposite of what Brene Brown says clear is kind is what she said it's The opposite, unclear is unkind.

20:21So start with clarity. Get really clear on your purpose. The second is build connection. And the connection is, do I know, care for, value, give a damn, the book I wrote, do I give a damn about our employees? Do I care for them? And then the third piece is, is this place actually creative? Not in just a, do we have a pretty break room or whatever, But is it creative in the sense of, does it evoke human emotion? Is there energy in this building that's flowing in a way that feels vibrant, alive, interactive, contagious, connected, all that, right? And then ultimately, are we committed to being on that path of simplicity?

21:04And for us, you know, how that shows up in practical form is we call it the human first brand blueprint. And it starts with that purpose. and usually the purpose is like ethereal and kind of wordy and jargony and corporate and it's like no no like we want to simplify it for guild for us as an example our purpose is to create meaningful abundance which sounds weird coming from a brand agency but that's what we want to be a part of is to create meaningful abundance in our own business and then therefore in the business of the partners that choose to work with us and then it walks down into kind of a spinal column of the brand heartbeat?

21:42How does that brand beat from an internal perspective? What is that word or phrase that will orient an architect behavior? So for us, it's cultivate connections. So we show up in the world by, hey, we want to connect people. We want to make sure Josh knows so-and-so and so that their lives get better. And then of course, the byproduct is we were the broker of the connection. And then the heartbeat principles or think of it as values is how does that purpose us in that heartbeat express itself through the beliefs and the behaviors of our team. And then ultimately, there's some brand stuff around personality, story, and then the visual identity of how that is represented.

22:23Because the visuals ultimately reflect all of that lovely core brand work. And so anyway, I could go way deep in that. But in simple form, I think if leaders and organizations can think about culture, culture is not a committee or a, you know, or a pizza party. That's not culture. Culture is a byproduct. Culture is an outcome. So culture is, do the people that work here, is it clear? Are we connected to them? Like actually connected to them? Are we creating an environment that's actually creative in the sense of energies flowing and people like it here? And then are we committed to walking that road.

23:04Yeah. Justin, your website is guildcollective.com. To our friend that's been listening, where do they go from here? Oh, man, they go, they can follow us here. I write on LinkedIn almost every day. So we connect on LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn. It's so awesome, especially when you inject some humanity into it, not just like AI weird formatted posts that aren't even from you. And so, yeah, I'd say either go collective.com or on LinkedIn, just search my name, Justin Rickless. Yeah. And we've got those direct links in our show notes. So to our friend that's listening right now, open up your podcast app, click around, you'll find a direct link, go see, go just go see Justin's website.

23:46And, and by the way, Justin, you know, we didn't really talk about your book, but it's called give a damn, which I think that they can find that through your website as well. Yeah. Justin, it's been a great conversation. Thank you for the journey that you've taken us on. Well, we're gonna have to do it again, Josh, and we'll talk about birds and all sorts of stuff. Love it. Thank you for joining us.

24:09Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If your goal is to grow your business, increase revenue and build authority without gimmicks, this show is designed for you. Each episode gives you practical insight from leaders who have turned trust and credibility into real business results. If you value short, thoughtful conversations that respect your time, make sure you're subscribed. We publish daily 15-minute episodes focused on growth that actually compounds. And if you're interested in being a guest or you want to turn podcast appearances into measurable business growth, visit podverified.com.

24:45You can start for free with your Podverified score along with free podcast guest training and a free media kit builder. These tools are built to help you get booked on better shows, deliver stronger interviews, and convert audience trust into revenue. No more desperate sales. You truly can enjoy all the business you like by generously sharing your wisdom. Everything we offer is built by podcasters for guests with a focus on trust, organic growth, and long-term business success. Thanks again for spending your time with us. I'll see you next time. We'll be right back.