Real World Leadership - Intentional Culture, Smart Hiring & People First Practices with Justin Clarke

Can real-world experience and intentional culture transform your leadership approach and drive sustainable success?

In this episode, Justin Clarke, Founder & CEO of F-Staff On Demand, shares his journey from a 19-year-old entrepreneur to leading a successful staffing agency for commercial truck drivers.

He shares his candid reflections on why real-world experience trumps academic theory - inspiration for budding entrepreneurs to take bold steps.

Justin highlights the vital importance of building an intentional culture, making thoughtful hiring decisions, and actively listening and engaging with employees. He shares how infusing fun into the workplace keeps teams motivated and aligned, unlocking the limitless potential of people when they are nurtured and empowered.

Whether you're navigating the complexities of people, process, or profits, Justin's wisdom on prioritizing people will resonate with leaders striving for long-term prosperity.

Don't miss this episode packed with actionable insights and transformative ideas from a seasoned CEO who’s been in the trenches.

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Seeking to strengthen your culture, boost performance & impact your bottom line? Let’s chat—no sales, just real talk about your challenges.
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Transcript

William Gladhart : 0:00

Welcome to the Leadership L Podcast. I'm your host, will Gladheart, cmo at the Culture Think Tank. At the Culture Think Tank, we empower leaders with metrics that strengthen culture, drive performance and return. We're here today to learn about the actions leaders have taken to address organizational change. Our guest today is Justin Clarke, C at F-Staff. et's start by having you share with audience a bit about yourself, your background and your company.

Justin Clarke: 0:38

Sure, so again. My name is Justin. I am known as a startup entrepreneur. I started my first company at 19 years old, after dropping out of college, and it was an epiphany that I had that all of my professors that I was learning from had no experience in operating a business. So I made the kind of bold decision to drop out of college, start my first company at 19, and solicit all of my education from other CEOs and mentors that were operating in their industry, and I could learn from that really interesting start. I'm from Arizona. I have a beautiful family, a wife of 19 years and two kids that are now teenagers.

Justin Clarke: 1:17

And so our life is filled with sports, filled with travel and filled with chasing kids around nonstop, being a part-time Uber driver and a full-time CEO. Sometimes can pull different strings at you, but yeah, from Arizona, and it's currently what is it? Probably a balmy 109 degrees at 10 AM right now, so living in the heat in Phoenix, Arizona, nice.

William Gladhart : 1:39

So tell us just to wrap up the first part a little bit, tell us a little bit more about your company.

Justin Clarke: 1:45

Sure, the company is called F-Staff On Demand. F-staff is a staffing agency that focuses solely on placing commercial truck drivers with motor carriers that need drivers on demand. We've been doing it since 2001. As I mentioned, I started the company at 19. Our primary focus and sole focus has continued to remain in the supply chain category and expanding our business into more markets, more cities, more states, to allow for us to offer more service offerings to our customers and bring more of our service offerings to our truck drivers. So really, the truck driver, staff and company, and we love what we do.

William Gladhart : 2:22

That's awesome. I love that you found that passion. So we will be discussing three questions today as a warmup to our conversation. Would you share why you believe a healthy culture is critical?

Justin Clarke: 2:33

I would put it this way If the culture is the heart and soul of an organization, it's critically important and it's funny when you start a business, you don't necessarily start with culture in mind, although some entrepreneurs absolutely do. The culture is a vital aspect to every company and I'll tell my friends that are in business you have a culture whether you create it or not. So whether culture creates you or you create culture, it's definitely an easier pathway forward to lead a company with intention and intentional culture, be it mission, values, vision, things that are very clear for an organization to follow, it really does help continue to keep a successful life forward for any organization. Similar to how us, as individuals, need to focus on our hearts and souls of our bodies to continue to lead a successful life, organizations need to continue to focus on their culture to lead a successful future for their companies.

William Gladhart : 3:26

Yeah, I love that you bring that up, that you have a culture, whether you want one or not.

William Gladhart : 3:31

And you can either start with intentionality and build, or you're going to be addressing it at some point and it's much harder to change the course of the ship in midstream versus you know. Hey, let's actually have a discussion around it from the beginning. So let's begin with question one. It's been our experience that leaders tend to struggle in three key areas people, process or profits. In your role as CEO, would you identify which one of these areas presented a cultural challenge within your organization?

Justin Clarke: 3:59

Well, I would say to be honest, it's a constant battle between all three. Right, to keep a strong culture. If you don't have profits, your people are going to continue to be disrupted. Right, their future is going to be tough. If the process isn't followed, the people are going to have issues. But I really stress the importance of the people. The people are the most important aspect of every organization. Especially a service organization like our company is, for us, the biggest area for those three would absolutely start, and always, with people inside of our company.

William Gladhart : 4:31

Yeah, so was there a specific challenge or something that positively or negatively impacted your organization around people?

Justin Clarke: 4:39

You bet, I think the learning moment that I had about the importance of people was really just a bad hire. Right, and I think a lot of companies will have had this experience or will have this experience and or may have it multiple times. But a bad hire really affected our organization negatively and it was difficult to see how far that negativity was sliding into the organization from that bad hire. And so the bad hire that we had made was at a managerial level that was responsible over multiple departments and while the manager was reporting uphill and giving good information and insights to leaders, the manager was just absolutely ruthless to everyone underneath and us leaders didn't recognize that, that the manager was affecting the people as much as the manager was until we actually lost some other people in the process.

Justin Clarke: 5:30

So having a bad hire, especially a bad hire that is a toxic manager, can absolutely just add ripple effect of negativity inside of a company. So that was my learning moment to make sure that we slowed down our hiring process. So slow to hire, fast to fire. We want to make sure that when we're bringing people into the organization we put them through multiple interviews and multiple screenings to really get ourselves a better captured understanding of who that person is for the future. So we get ourselves a better understanding of the people that we're hiring.

William Gladhart : 5:58

Yeah, well, and certainly because of you're a not only a recruitment and talent acquisition type agency that helps place things in logistics. The frontline people are ultimately the most important and I appreciate that you shared that. The red flag was good. People walked out the door and that was because of the toxicity of the leader in that particular group or group of part of your organization. So great lesson learned. I really appreciate you shared that challenge. So what is what is maybe the one thing that you have identified that helped impact your culture or your employees performance positively?

Justin Clarke: 6:35

I mean we try to communicate as best as possible. We use a lot of technology to do that, but we also do a lot of one-on-one engagement. Really, I think the only thing you need to do to learn what's going on inside your business is to talk to the people that are performing the tasks inside of it. So I do a lot of talking and engaging with my teams and when I'm not sharing vision, I'm trying to open up my ears and listen as much as possible so that I could learn how to help guide the company forward. But constant engagement and building in a little fun in that process. So, whether that's getting outside of your business or bringing fun inside of your business, it's something that really brings a little bit of joy in the process, because business is a tough sport, right, and it can be challenging every day. So if we can remember to bring a little bit of fun in, I think it really brings, you know, brings the energies up inside the people and kind of helps us keep that strong culture moving forward.

William Gladhart : 7:29

I really love that you shared that. I think that's a that's some really valuable insight of keeping it fun, but also looking at doing it both inside and outside of the business. So is there anything else you'd like to share with leaders or you know, as we kind of wrap up our session today?

Justin Clarke: 7:45

Well, I mean, we talked a lot about people. I would just say, you know, one thing I've always learned is that people are capable of so much more than what we imagine them to be - Right. And so I would continue to stretch every leader's mind, to stretch their conversations with their people to find out what those things are. And, again, turn a listening ear into your people to find out how we might be able to help them master their lives as best as possible, Because I think inside of our organizations we can really develop our people in a multitude of ways. So I would tell leaders, turn into your people, keep that ear open and let's keep just driving our businesses forward.

William Gladhart : 8:20

That's awesome. Thank you so much, Justin. I've enjoyed having you on our Leadership Lovers podcast. I appreciate your insights.

William Gladhart : 8:27

Thank you, Will.

William Gladhart : 8:30

Thank you for joining us on the Leadership Levers Podcast. Find all our Leadership Levers episodes on the Culture Think Tank website at www. theculture thinktank. com or listen on your favorite streaming platform. We'd love to hear from you about the challenges you have faced as a leader. Tune in weekly as we invite leaders to share their experiences in strengthening culture and performance, one action at a time.