Staci Wright, CEO & Founder, HeartProfit | The Jeff Crilley Show

On this episode of The Jeff Crilley Show, Jeff sits down with Staci Wright, CEO and founder of HeartProfit, to talk about why compassion isn’t a weakness in business—it’s a competitive advantage. Staci shares her entrepreneurial journey, including building six companies over two decades, and the personal story of her sister’s battle with addiction that reshaped her understanding of leadership....

Show Notes

What if the key to higher performance at work isn’t harder management—but deeper care?

On this episode of The Jeff Crilley Show, Jeff talks with Staci Wright, CEO & Founder of HeartProfit. A mother of two and serial entrepreneur who has built six businesses over 20 years, including a multi-million-dollar venture, Staci now leads a nonprofit movement focused on transforming workplace culture through compassion-driven leadership.

In this conversation, Staci shares:
- The personal story of her sister’s battle with addiction—and how one caring boss changed everything
- Why the traditional top-down “pyramid” leadership model is failing today’s workforce
- The HeartProfit “tree” framework that connects healthy leadership to healthy profit
- The difference between compliance and commitment—and why it matters for retention

She also explains HeartProfit’s certification program for leaders who want to build trust, increase performance, and create workplaces where people actually thrive.

Learn more at: https://heartprofit.org

What is The Jeff Crilley Show?

Jeff Crilley is a former news reporter, who spent more than 25 years in newsrooms across the country. He’s an Emmy Award winning journalist, who decided to make the jump from news in 2008, when he founded his own PR Firm, Real News Public Relations.

Today, the firm has more than 100 clients, and Jeff continues to tell the stories of interesting people he meets along the way.

These are those stories.

Coming up next on The Jeff Crilley Show, you're gonna meet a dear friend. Staci Wright is in the studio. She's the CEO and founder of HeartProfit, and she's on a mission to change the way leaders look at leadership. Her journey just ahead. Many are predicting that the worst is yet to come, which is unfortunate, said one person here. Until now, they've enjoyed the reputation of being the nation's icebox. Watched a burglar in his home this morning by webcam. As a journalist of over twenty five years, stories are what make my world turn. Reporting live from The Dallas Newsroom tonight, Jeff Crilley, Fox four news. But in 2008, I took the jump from my familiar life and started a PR firm from my home. We're talking about anyone with a camcorder like the one I'm using becomes a television network. We started slowly growing the company, and we now have over a 100 clients. And we've branched into the world of live digital broadcasting. I now own eight different TV studios and have a huge team. And the stories that I now get to share are sometimes the most important of my life. Life has a funny way of coming around full circle. This is The Jeff Crilley Show. Well, when I was growing up, the leadership style was my way or the highway, and that doesn't play very well with the millennials and the gen z's. They wanna be a part of the organization. They wanna feel like they have a voice, and that's why I invited Staci Wright on the show, she's a dear friend, she's the CEO and founder of HeartProfit. Thank you for coming on the show. Yes, thank you for having me, this is exciting. Alright, before we get into kind of your mission and ministry and leadership, I want to know more about your background. You have a lot of business experience. Yes, I'm actually an entrepreneur by nature. I've had six businesses over the last twenty years, and love, love, love business, and the power of business to solve problems. Yes. And so, about fifteen, twenty years ago, I started doing a lot of volunteerism. So as I was doing a lot of volunteerism, I started seeing a different side of the world. And I started seeing that we have a crisis going on, and we've got to do something a little bit different. And that set my entrepreneurial journey in a little bit of a different direction, more of a social impact. How can we use the power of business to solve some of these social issues that we're having, like addiction and homelessness and all of the things. Well, and every survey I've ever seen has said that great employees don't leave companies, they leave bad bosses. So tell me more about heartprofit. How do you help change the narrative? You know, I'd like to actually back up just a minute and tell a story about my sister. My sister was the valedictorian of her class. She was a bright, bright individual. She actually ran a multi million dollar company in her 30s. But then as life got difficult, like it does for a lot of us, one of her coping mechanisms turned into something that was not so healthy. And she started going down a bad path, a path of addiction and a path of alcoholism. And it was about a fifteen year decline that we just watched her kind of go backwards, if you will, or just lose her will to live. But in the middle of that fifteen year period, there was a one year period where everything changed and the lights came back on in her eyes and she started caring about herself again and she started caring about her job, and she got a promotion at work, and she was in a manager like she used to be. I mean, her life just started coming back together, she quit drinking that year. And the only thing that was different that one year was her boss. She had a boss that year that cared about her, that connected with her, that took the time to get to know her and her potential, and brought her up to And her just that little bit of connection and care changed everything for my sister. And that was when everything just really hit me at a deeper level. It's like, we spend so much time at work, so much time at work. When we're in healthy work environments, we go home in a different space than if we're working in a toxic work environment, we go home different. And so that right there showed me that if we're different at work as bosses, as leaders, we have the ability to impact others in a big way. What is heartprofit? HeartProfit is an organization that is focused on transforming workspaces and workplaces into places where humans thrive. You had a great analogy before the show. You said you compared leadership to a tree, and most people look at a tree differently. Yes, yes. Okay, so the way we've been doing business is a pyramid. So we've got the leader at the top, and it's top down command and control. Right? And that's how we've done business, and it worked for a while. But in today's society, it's not working. And so how heartprofit sees business and leadership is we're taking that pyramid and we're turning it upside down. And it's no longer a pyramid, now it's more like a tree. The leader is not at the top anymore. The leader needs to be in the roots. And when you have healthy roots and a healthy environment, your tree naturally produces fruit. Fruit is your profit. Right? And I see the leaves as the employees. So when you have healthy, strong roots with a good environment, you naturally produce healthy both employees and profit, and heartprofit believes that those aren't mutually exclusive. Like you can have both healthy people and profit. Yes, absolutely brilliant, and the timing couldn't be more perfect. We're gonna pull up your website because you have a certification program. Talk about that. We actually have a curriculum where we take leaders through this program that teaches this framework of leadership that allows you to have compassion and care. Because a lot of people think, oh, and care, that's soft, that's weak. We don't bring that to business. But actually, if you have a framework of leadership, and you know this because of the way you run your business, but if you have a framework of leadership that is strong, that has certain principles and foundations, you can actually insert compassion and care and your performance goes up. You actually get more performance and better results as a result. Well, every day I see these headlines about quiet quitting or rage applying or just employees just kind of checking out. Your organization really changes that narrative that employees look forward to coming to They do, they enjoy coming to work. And we always tell our leaders, would you rather have compliance or commitment? There's a big difference between the two, right? Compliance is nice. Yes. Right? You have your needs met and the things you want done, done. But commitment, that's a whole different way of doing business. And when you have a team of people that are committed to your vision and your mission, things are a lot different. And that's what we develop in this certification program. So we take leaders through a curriculum, they become heartprofit certified, and that gives them the framework they need to then be able to have compassion and connection and performance in their organization. I love that, and I saw a study one time that says it costs to replace a great employee it costs between half a year salary and a year and a half salary because just when you train them up and you get them where they need to be they're out the door. And it becomes very expensive to have a revolving door, doesn't it? Oh, absolutely. It's so costly for a number of reasons, but it also stops your momentum when you have to stop and go back and then train somebody else up. So keeping employees long term, there's a huge benefit to that in both profit and productivity. Well, I urge you to follow Staci on all her platforms because she gives away the gold. She shares so many tips. I found one video that I really like. Let's go ahead and roll that. This is something that everybody is dealing with is stress. So what happens when we're under this kind of stress? It changes our brain functioning. I kinda see it like Wi Fi bars. When you have your phone and you have three full Wi Fi bars, you can do a whole lot of things. You can get around really easy on the Internet. You can do a lot of things efficiently and and quickly. But once you lose a bar, things slow down. And if you lose two bars, things really slow down, and it gets really frustrating. Well, that's similar to what happens when we go into higher states of stress. We start losing brain power or smart brain power. Our emotions become mixed, and our behavior becomes moderate. Sometimes you can make a good decision. Sometimes you can't. It's a mixed reaction. So I call this like having spotty Wi Fi. And we should point out that you are a nonprofit. Yes. We are a five zero one c three, and we are a movement. So we are board run, volunteer led, we are looking for people who resonate with this message, who care about changing business and the way we do business. When you look at your average graduate, are they Gen Z, are they Millennials, Boomers, all of the above? We've had all of the above. I would say that the majority of them are smaller, small business owners, less than a 100 employees, because those are the ones that really, they want to bring the compassion to their business. They want to bring the compassion to their employees. But they're finding what they're finding, this is what I found when I first started this, is that when I bring compassion, performance falls. And then how do we get performance back and compassion, and how do we do that in a world where we've been running it like a pyramid? Well, so many leaders think that workplace culture is get a ping pong table, put a slogan on the wall. Yes. Yes. But employees can feel if the leader is really in it, Yeah. Can't Yes. And what we say is the currency of the future is trust. We live in a society that trust has just been annihilated in every facet of government and healthcare and the way we do business. So trust is really what people are looking for and how do you do that? And you can almost feel it as soon as you walk in the door of a company. You can tell a happy company from an unhappy company, can't you? Oh, absolutely. You can feel it. Yeah. You can feel it. And even job candidates when they walk in, just the way the receptionist smiles or doesn't smile tells you a lot about the company. Yes, that's exactly right. And you can feel it. Everybody's been to Trader Joe's, right? So you go into Trader Joe's and you're in the checkout line, they're like, what are you doing this weekend? Right. It's like, really? It's a happy place to it. Yeah. That's awesome. We have about two minutes left, so I want you to look into the camera on the left and talk to the leader who really needs to become a part of your movement. Yeah, I would say if you are a business person, you're a leader, you are a boss or your manager, you definitely want to check out HeartProfit. We are a community of leaders that care and are doing business differently, and we're showing that. Also, we have plenty of opportunity for people who like being a part of something new. We are a movement, and we are changing this narrative in the world. And if that lights you up, I would love to connect with you because we have lots of opportunity for volunteerism and for people to bring their voice to this much needed movement in the world. Outstanding. Thank you so much for sharing your heart and your wisdom with us. I urge you all to go to her website, which is heartprofit.org. The great Staci Wright, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. That's it for now. We'll see you next time.