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 as 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. Dina Dwyer-Owens: 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? Dina Dwyer-Owens: 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. So 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. And 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. And 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. In and day out. So when he launched the business in 81 he
launched it with what he coined his code of values. And you know, looking back, there are probably more emotionally based beliefs, things like loyalty as 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 dying and cleaning company. So we could come into your house, if you had that good old tan shag carpeting and you wanted it 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 fly 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 air serve 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 made 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 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". Okay, so you you use that a lot. Rich is actually an acronym. Dina Dwyer-Owens: 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. 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 of product or
service profits. The 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.
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? Dina Dwyer-Owens: Yeah, a couple of things. You know, it has a lot to do with the people. People are a 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, then training to that system or process and making sure people are living up to it. And then, unfortunately, these are independent small business owners. Every franchisee is a small business owner and and even though we want them all to follow the systems perfectly, that's not going to happen.
It'll never happen. We have 2800 franchises 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 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 franchises who are committed to delivering the brand promise, which is
really what the systems do. And if I 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. And 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 he 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, you know, as a franchise organization, we
always think about system, 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 we 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 handed them a laminated card. On one side of the card had the original values, Don'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 Road Runner 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, this. Not 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 could write 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 and 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? Can we just focus on one that we know we need to get better at? There's one that's very topical. You know, if you think about, we're having a meeting about customer service, but we want to talk about one of the values that has to do with customer loyalty. 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? Dina Dwyer-Owens: 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, and the minute we start getting lazy about it, we lose an opportunity to really be great when properly practice values inflict pain. They make some employees feel like outcast. 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. 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 and the founder and owner of all the Omni resorts, they shared a story about his values, and they said, here's the guy who goes up to his values, and the numbers is not what drives it, it's it's what's right, doing the right thing. So, you know, they have these terrible adult stations on TVs in these hotel rooms. 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. You know, he doesn't know every single working of the 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. 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 he'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 vows. 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. Is 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, Dina, 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. Dina Dwyer-Owens: Yeah, they can simply go to Dina Dwyer owens.com and it's D, W, y, E, R, owens.com. Okay, so here's our 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 mid level manager at some large public organization, and they're not, 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? Dina Dwyer-Owens: 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. Dina Dwyer-Owens: Thank you for the opportunity, and I hope that
the listeners will join this movement. We really can change the world one person at a time.