The Action Catalyst
REMASTERED: Values Driven Leadership, with Dina Dwyer-Owens (Franchising, Business, Morals, Ethics)
Tue, 28 Jan 2025
Author, speaker, and franchising leader Dina Dwyer-Owens opens up about creating a code of values BEFORE you launch a business, re-earning your position every day, how to live R.I.C.H. and scale in franchising, and why to gamify your processes.
This is who we are. This is the only way that we're going to keep these values front and center. And the minute we start getting lazy about it, I liken it to people who do a good job of brushing their teeth, but they don't floss their teeth very often. And what happens when you don't floss your teeth very often? You get rot, you get decay. And what happens when you start having decay?
it not only affects your teeth, it affects major organs in your body. And in my mind, it's up to the leader to stay firm on the fact that you've got to keep the values front and center because the minute you quit flossing, you're going to get decay.
top leaders, meaningful conversation, actionable advice, bulldoze complacency, ignite inspiration, create impact. Produced by the Southwestern family of companies, this is The Action Catalyst.
Are you interested in advertising with The Action Catalyst? Our listeners could be hearing about your brand right here, right now. For details, shoot us an email at info at theactioncatalyst.com.
I am honored today to introduce to you somebody who is not only a thought leader, but much more importantly, a practitioner, Dina Dwyer-Owens. You may recognize her as Faith Brown on Undercover Boss, which was one of the most popular episodes from that reality TV show.
She's also an author, and we're going to talk about some of her stuff today around her first book was called Live Rich and then Values, Inc., Her real life job is the co-chair of the Dwyer Group, which is a billion dollar, well over a billion dollar organization that is in sort of the franchise space. Anyways, I'm excited and honored. Dina, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I'm the one who's honored here. I so appreciate the opportunity to share with all your listeners about what's most important to me at the Dwyer Group.
Yeah, so how did the Dwyer Group get started?
Well, my father, Don Dwyer, founded the company in 1981, and he had a vision for having a collection of franchise businesses, basically serving the same customer base. And he was just so clear about his vision, his mission, and his values. In fact, his mission statement still lives on today, and that's to teach our principles and systems.
Franchising is all about systems of personal and business success so that all people we touch, live happier, more successful lives. It's a great way to wake up every day. We're in the business of helping people have a better quality of life. We just happen to use franchising as our vehicle to do that. When Don founded the company, he also had always been a student of leadership.
Those listening are all students of leadership here. We all want to get better. Don said... how do I really start this company off right with the right foundation? And what he had learned by studying great leaders was that they were always clear about their values and that they put their values in writing and then they put their values to work.
And they worked hard to practice those values day in and day out. So when he launched the business in 81, he launched it with what he coined his code of values. And looking back, they're probably more emotionally based beliefs, things like Loyalty has meaning to our lives. We must count our blessings every day in every way.
And one that I will never forget, and unfortunately we lost Don in 1994, but one value as a kid growing up in his business was re-earning our position every day in every way. So he always said, celebrate the victories of the past, learn from the mistakes, but be better today than you were yesterday.
So Don again had this vision and he began to build the company with Rainbow International, which was the flagship company, which was back then a carpet dyeing and cleaning company. So we could come into your house if you had that good old hand shag carpeting and you wanted to take care of some stains, we could make that a nice brown shag carpeting. That industry has changed.
So Rainbow today is a restoration and carpet cleaning company mostly focused on fire and flood restoration. And then he bought a company called Mr. Reuter and it was actually a penny stock that he ended up doing a reverse merger on in 93 and took the company public. Started up some brands like Mr. Electric and AirServe and Mr. Appliance.
And after his passing, we bought a company called The Glass Doctor. And from there, The Grounds Guys and Mr. Handyman and Molly Maid and Five Star Painting. And I'm probably forgetting some, Window Genie. So today, our key business is being a values-guided world leader of franchise brands that focus on enhancing, repairing, and maintaining customers' homes and businesses.
But my mind's still to net it all out. It's about helping anybody we touch have a better quality of life. And again, franchising is the vehicle we happen to use to do that, whether it's touching our franchisees' lives, our customers' lives, our vendors' lives. It's all about making a positive impact.
Yeah.
So talk to me about Live Rich. OK, so you you use that a lot. Rich is actually an acronym.
So in 1993, I mentioned we took our company public, which was a big step for our founder and my father. And then unfortunately, in 1994, he died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 60. So quite a young man. Wow. So one of the things that we knew as a leadership team was we had to keep this culture special. It's what attracted the strong franchisees we had.
It's what attracted the great team that we had. They were aligned in those values. So we knew we had to keep that foundation strong. We took Don's original values, his belief system, and we operationalized it. So that's where Rich came from. And Rich stands for respect, integrity, customer focus, and having fun in the process.
So when we say we live rich at the Dwyer Group, of course, we're in business to make money at the end of the day. But it's about how we treat people. And when we treat people with respect and dignity. We provide a quality product or service. Profits are the applause we get, as my friend Ken Blanchard would say. I have to say we're guilty of over the years going down some bunny trails.
You get excited about other businesses that are franchisable or franchise. And yet our teams had to come back, stay focused on what we're really great at. And that's these home service type businesses.
Mm-hmm. What do you think is the difference between the companies that successfully franchise and they start to successfully scale and then the ones that can never really create that scale?
Yeah, a couple of things. It has a lot to do with the people. People are our pedigree at the Dwyer Group and at all franchise companies because it takes the people to create the systems and then coach the franchisees to those systems. So at Dwyer, and again, a franchise, you're right. It's all about taking what's complicated about business and streamlining that into a system or process
And training to that system or process and making sure people are living up to it. And unfortunately, these are independent small business owners. Every franchisee is a small business owner. And even though we want them all to follow the systems perfectly, that's not going to happen. You know, it'll never happen. We have 2,800 franchisees today. The majority of them do a beautiful job.
living by the system and those are the ones realizing the most success but unfortunately some feel like they've got their own ideas and and you know you coach them up and if you can't coach them up to follow the systems you have to coach them out because it's not fair to the other franchisees who are committed to delivering the brand promise which is really what the systems do
I'd like to talk just for a second about the distinction about the Dwyer Group's core values. We would not be where we are today. We've grown at a pace of about 50% the last three years, some of that through acquisition, but a lot of that through organic growth.
If it weren't for the alignment of our team around our core values, I don't think we could be here because it's one thing to have great systems, but if you don't have great people that really believe in those systems and believe in delivering that value to the customer, you're right. That is who we're competing with. We're competing with who's going to solve the customer's problems.
Even around our values, we had to create a system for keeping those values front and center. We learned our lesson when Don Dwyer passed away in 94. He was the one who would hold us accountable to the original values. So he'd let you know if you felt you were loyal today or you weren't. You know, the values weren't that black and white. Well, today, our values are very clear.
One of our values is continuously striving to maximize internal and external customer loyalty. And the internal customers are our employee. The external customer is you, the person who's calling us to your home or business to take care of keeping your, again, your home or business comfortable. So the values really have been the foundation for our success.
But had we not put a system in place, we wouldn't be where we are today. And I think people make this more complicated than they need to, but they're not in franchising. So as a franchise organization, we always think about systems, systems, systems. If something's not working, it's probably because the system is not there or people haven't been trained to it.
So when we created the operationalized code of values, we knew as a leadership team, Number one, we couldn't just throw them in the face of our employees and say, hey, look, starting today, these are going to be the new values we're going to follow.
Instead, we said to our employees, and we didn't realize we were being so smart when we gamified our values, but we basically said to our employees, we think this is going to be the solution to keeping our culture special. We handed them a laminated card. On one side of the card had the original values, Dawn's values.
On the other side of the card had the new operationalized values, the rich values. And we said, we need your help. For the next 90 days, we want you guys to study these values. And in order to show our commitment to you, we want you to give us feedback. Anytime you catch a management team member violating a value, we want you to give us a beep. And as silly as that sounds, it worked.
So the employees really studied these values much more than I would have ever imagined because they loved the idea of catching their bosses doing something wrong. So if you could imagine the roadrunner running through our building for 90 days, that's what it sounded like around here. We were being beeped.
It's just a verbal beep, beeped right and left because we were so bad at the new operationalized values. So once we played that game, we brought the team back together. We asked them what they thought and they loved it. And they added a value that I think is the toughest one we have today.
But we said, okay, so going forward, because this cannot die when the CEO of the company dies or the leadership team dies in this company. It's got to be sustainable. So let's create a system. We said anytime we have the meeting of three or more of our team members or our franchisees, we're simply going to bring the values front and center in that meeting.
So before we talk about anything else, we're going to either review all 15 values in our case, because they're really behavioral statements if you want to think about them being that black and white. And sometimes we might just highlight a value that we're not so good at. Maybe we've gotten some feedback from a customer that we're not doing a great job responding in a timely fashion, for example.
Or maybe we highlight a team member who's gotten exceptional feedback. The bottom line is at the beginning of every meeting of three or more, we should take a deep breath and reflect on our values. And most of our team members, not all of them, because we're a fast-growing company, many of our team members can do that by heart, with heart, as we call it. It's not just a memorization act.
We want people to internalize the values so that when a problem occurs, what happens in your mind is you go right to a value or maybe a number of values that can be the solution to the problem. We do it out loud. And sometimes, again, we'll go over all 15 values.
Sometimes we'll just highlight the key areas, showing respect for all people, acting with integrity in all dealings, and serving customers with enthusiasm. It just kind of depends on how many meetings you're in in a day. Sometimes it seems, oh, all 15 again? Can we just focus on one that we know we need to get better at? There's one that's very topical.
If you think about we're having a meeting about customer service, well, we want to talk about one of the values that has to do with customer loyalty.
Mm-hmm. Okay, so let me play the devil's advocate here, right? Like, we don't have the extra two minutes to spare to do this. What do you say to that?
This is what I say to the leader. You don't want to hear the whining. This is who we are. This is the only way that we're going to keep these values front and center. And the minute we start getting lazy about it, I liken it to people who do a good job of brushing their teeth, but they don't floss their teeth very often. And what happens when you don't floss your teeth very often?
You get rot, you get decay. And what happens when you start having decay? It not only affects your teeth, it affects major organs in your body. And in my mind, it's up to the leader to stay firm on the fact that you've got to keep the values front and center. Because the minute you quit flossing... You're going to get decay. You start getting decay. Organs start shutting down.
Your body is not going to be at optimal health. It's the same thing with a franchise organization or any organization. The values have to remain front and center. The minute we start getting lazy about it, we lose an opportunity to really be great. When properly practiced, values inflict pain. They make some employees feel like outcasts.
They can limit an organization's strategic and operational freedom and constrain the behavior of its people. They leave executives open to heavy criticism for even minor violations. And they demand constant vigilance. So this value step is not for everybody. It's really not for the faint of heart. I have a quick example for you.
I was just at a, I'm on the board of Lead Like Jesus, which is a Ken Blanchard nonprofit organization. And it's about teaching that Jesus is the greatest leadership role model of all times. It's not about being a believer in Jesus, you know, that then he was a prophet for some, but it's about the fact that he was such a great leader.
And the founder and owner of all the Omni Resorts, they shared a story about his values. And they said, here's a guy who lives up to his values. And the numbers is not what drives it. It's what's right, doing the right thing. So, you know, they have these terrible adult stations on TVs in these hotel rooms. Oh, yes. They're poison. They're poison.
And this guy was in one of his hotel rooms one night and realized they had these adult channels. He doesn't know every single working of the hotel. Can't possibly. 30,000 employees, a big, big operation. And he says, what are we doing here? Why do we have this? He got with his management team and they disconnected all of the adult channels.
Now that takes courage, but that's following your values all the way through. And you know what? As a customer, guess where I'm going to stay? Because I respect that he's got the courage to make that kind of decision. Losing millions a year, but not having the adult stations. But it's not really losing millions a year because he's living up to his values.
What's most important because when you do that, it translates into financial results. We're proof of it at the Dwyer Group. We had a private equity partner who took us private in 2003, sold us in 2010. Three years later, came knocking on our door to buy us back because they were having a hard time putting a new $1.5 billion fund they had raised to work with great companies.
And they said, what we love about Dwyer is your culture, the mission that you have, the leadership team, and of course, the growth opportunities are huge. Every franchisee has an opportunity to grow their business. My attitude, and I say this in the book a couple of times, the rewards are really too great to ignore. And is it easy? No. It's not easy getting clarity about your values.
It's not easy making sure that you're leading with them because we are human beings and we fail every day. You know, every day probably somebody could beat me for not living up to the value to the degree that I should be. But I'm doing my best. I'm striving to live those. And that's all we can ask of our team.
And we're surrounded by people at Dwyer who work hard to live up to those values every day. Our values have surrounded us with people that are like-minded, that really care about that customer experience that you talked about early on. Without the values, though, we wouldn't be able to do this. I'm certain.
Yeah. Dean, I do have one other question that I want to make sure to ask you. But before I do that, where do you want people to go to connect with you, you know, learn more?
Yeah, they can simply go to DinaDwyerOwens.com and it's D-W-Y-E-R Owens.com.
Okay, so here's my last question. Let's say there's somebody out there listening and maybe they run a franchise. Maybe they have a small business. Maybe they are a mid-level manager at some large public organization and they don't have ownership, but they have leadership. To the leader that's out there listening right now, what action, would you encourage them to immediately take?
The first action would be is discover if you do have clearly written values because most of the time organizations have done a lot of work, whether, again, it's a church or a for-profit business. They've done a lot of work thinking about what's important to them. So I would say dig those up. Dig those values up. Get with key leaders in that organization. It could even be a family.
It could be a parent who's listening. And sit down and talk about those. Revisit them. Polish them up. And again, download the Create Your Culture workbook or invest in Values, Inc. There's some very clear directions at the back of Values, Inc.
too on how to then take that to the next level so that you truly can create a system around keeping your values front and center so you don't forget who you are and what you want to stand for in this world.
Well, Dina, thank you so much for your time today. And we appreciate you taking the time.
Thank you for the opportunity. And I hope that listeners will join this movement. We really can change the world one person at a time.
If you enjoy this podcast, please make sure to subscribe and to stay updated on everything that the Action Catalyst is up to. Make sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Action Catalyst Podcast and on Twitter at Catalyst underscore Action. And as always, thanks for listening.