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For Love of Team™ is THE podcast where Leaders Simplify Teamwork, helping you: SURROUND yourself with others doing work they LOVE. Business mentor and strategist, Winston Faircloth believes that it is your love of TEAM, and not just your love of products and customers that sets you apart in the marketplace.
When you surround yourself with people working in their gifting, focused on a common mission, not only do you get to spend more time working where you're most gifted, but you create this virtuous circle, this virtuous cycle where your clients are being loved, your product is getting better, and you love that even more. Hey there. It's Winston Faircloth, and welcome back to For Love of Team, the podcast dedicated to helping you grow a team you love, multiplying your impact, income, and freedom in business. Unlocking the one Why so essential to attracting and keeping A plus team members. As a first generation college student, making the trek to Williamsburg from the Virginia Beach area was only about 60 miles, but it might as well have been a world away with a shy freshman.
Winston Faircloth:My parents were quiet the entire time in the drive over to my freshman dorm, right across the street from the entrance to CW, Colonial Williamsburg. And I was nervous as a cat, too. What had I gotten myself into by attending the College of William and Mary in the late 1970s? During high school, I was the big man on campus. At six foot seven, a solid two eighty pounds, the athlete, student, government officer, senior class president, former band member, active and after school clubs.
Winston Faircloth:I was everywhere. But a fluke injury on the fourth game of football season, in front of the D1 scouts, from the Ivy League, the ACC, and other colleges, ended my dream of ever attending college. Interests from Duke, Yale, University of Virginia, and Davidson quickly dried up, and I was so despondent. I basically checked out for the balance of my senior year, wearing a hip cast for months afterwards. And by some miracle, I was accepted here at William and Mary, a school not even on my radar in a town I'd last visited on a fifth grade field trip.
Winston Faircloth:And at the welcoming convocation, I learned just how unqualified I was. I was hundreds of points below the average SAT surrounded by hyper competitive kids all at the top of their classes from everywhere. My freshman hall was thankfully small and cozy, full of mitzvahs just like me. And little did I know that a future FBI director would live across the hall from me. A few weeks later, when I got my very first college exam score back, my fears of being unqualified were realized.
Winston Faircloth:I'd been looking for the easiest science elective I could find to help me balance my heavy load of classes, so I took Geology 101 aka Rocks for Jocks with a professor known for being a big sports fan, and I was clueless on how to study but thought I'd done pretty good until I got my scores back. I had an F. 38 out of 100. Yikes. Every day coming home from classes, there was this guy hanging out a lacrosse stick and ball, practicing certain moves against the weathered brick that surrounded us on all sides.
Winston Faircloth:And the background was this bluesy sounding music, unlike anything I'd ever heard of growing up in my town with a heavy dose of seventies pop and disco. There was a hard edged beat with lots of bravado. The lyrics said, yeah. I've got a tombstone hand on a graveyard mine. Just 22, baby.
Winston Faircloth:I don't mind dying. Snakeskin shoes, baby. Put them on your feet. Got the good time music and the Bo Diddley beat. Who do you love?
Winston Faircloth:Who do you love? That is a bad, bad rendition, but you get the gist. Maybe we could play a little bit of this in the background, but I'll have the link to the real song in the show notes. Well, my friend Skip became an instant best friend later that summer of my freshman year, and we're still close over forty years later. And I have him to thank to introduce me to the local musician Bruce Hornsby, and then later other bands like the Nighthawks, Bruce Springsteen, and yes, George Thurgood and the Delaware Destroyers who had a hit song called Who Do You Love?
Winston Faircloth:And it became the song of my freshman year and today's earworm topic for the podcast. So when it comes to who your business, who do you love? Your product, your clients, or your team? Who do you love? Well, let's break it down.
Winston Faircloth:Founder's journey is one where we see a issue. We see a challenge in the marketplace, and we come up with a product that we love. Face it, most of us founders are idea people. We love to solve problems. We seize opportunities.
Winston Faircloth:We create solutions. Often, we have more ideas than bandwidth. But there's something, something magical about seeing a solution that others cannot see and bringing that to the marketplace. The founder's journey often begins with a love of product. But then, we progress.
Winston Faircloth:We start getting people who buy the product. And we move from love of product to love of clients. We're finally getting traction, money's starting to flow, and our idea, our baby, is now serving others. And so, during this phase of a founder's journey, the focus begins to shift from that love of product to creating an amazing client experience, which has to be as good as the original product, idea, or service. Most of us have this intuitive experience of knowing what a remarkable client experience feels like and we're committed to delivering that for our clients.
Winston Faircloth:In earlier podcasts, I called this a level two leader. Level one loves their product. Level two loves their clients. And this is, you know, raising my hand and a true confession here for a moment. This is where I was stuck.
Winston Faircloth:Years ago when I had my social enterprise, the IT organization that I helped to start serving other not for profits, this is where I got stuck. I loved the product. It was a product that something I wished I had when I was working in the not for profit space. Having access to a great team of technology providers and to have a service that was going to be managed for me so that I could focus on the not for profit space, so I could focus on the mission and not worry about our tech and have access to the same kind of technology that many others had. That product was so compelling and so needed.
Winston Faircloth:And so it got traction, all right? We started with six, and then six became fifteen, fifteen became 30, and pretty soon we had about 20% of our addressable market using one or more of our services. So as the leader, as the CEO, as the founder, I moved quickly after the product was really being adopted and people were really loving what we were doing. I began to turn my attention to the love of clients. And boy, it's, you know, we're told in our culture, our leadership training is that the client's always right.
Winston Faircloth:And I embrace that to the nth degree. That love of client, making sure they were happy and that their needs were being met was the principal focus of my leadership for many, many years. A) Because, probably because of a bit of a scarcity mindset on my part, but also because the clients were such a source of inspiration for us in terms of coming up with new products and services. And I wanted their experience to be memorable. I remember one day we were, trying to come up with something to call our help desk.
Winston Faircloth:A lot of IT organizations have a help desk, but it just felt very clinical to me. And I remember one of our team members came up with the idea of why don't we, we call our clients members, they're members of the corporation, they're members, we wanted that sense of family. And so we ended up renaming the product and service, called it Member Services, and we wanted our folks to feel a sense of ownership and belonging, that we were here to help them no matter what. Taking it to an extreme, the love of product the love of clients can really be detrimental to your business. And so this is a confession of, if you will, it's my way of redeeming my prior experience because honestly I would say that I love my clients so much that my team was almost like an afterthought.
Winston Faircloth:Yet they were the people who were delivering that client experience. They were impediments. I felt like they were maybe holding us back from really loving our clients or loving our product, but it's just the opposite. So, as a founder, as a leader, one can love their product, one can love their clients, but think about this: Your client experience will only rise to the level of your team's satisfaction in business. So, loving your team is the BEST way to love your clients and the best way to love your product.
Winston Faircloth:When you surround yourself with people working in their gifting, focused on a common mission, not only do you get to spend more time working where you're most gifted, but you create this virtuous circle, this virtuous cycle where your clients are being loved, your product is getting better, and you love that even more. Don't make the same mistake I did. Just getting stuck in loving product and loving clients. Elevate. Think about how your love of team can really propel your vision, multiplying your impact, income, and freedom in business.
Winston Faircloth:Oh my goodness. George Thurgood would be so proud. He's the one that says, who do you love? And by the way, if you don't know what song I'm talking about, go check it out. Google George Thurgood and who do you love.
Winston Faircloth:If you're a blues fan, you'll really love this song. It is a very catchy earworm. You're gonna love it. So my question to you is, who do you love in your business? Is it your team?
Winston Faircloth:Is it your clients? Is it your product? You could only choose one. Where are you spending your time and attention? I'm gonna suggest based upon my experience and my observation of others, and you're gonna get to meet several of these folks coming on some upcoming episodes, People who've prioritized employees first, team members first, have this multiplication effect that is not out there in the typical business.
Winston Faircloth:You can have a business you love supported by a team you love. What could be better than that? I submit to you that For Love of Team is a leading indicator for your future success, multiplying your impact, income, and freedom in business. So who do you love? I'll catch you on the next episode.