Here We Grow Podcast | S1E12: Deborah Wood

Here We Grow

Episode 12

Episode Description

What does it take to build a resilient company culture capable of weathering any storm?

In this episode of Here We Grow, host Marcia Barnes speaks with Deborah Wood, Founder and Chairperson of Avant Healthcare about a pivotal moment when her business faced significant challenges and how a resilient company culture helped navigate through it.

Deborah stresses the importance of a value-driven culture and how these values guide critical decisions, including walking away from a toxic client. And that’s just one of Deborah’s hard-won lessons that led to her company’s remarkable growth despite the ever-present curveballs that life seems determined to throw her way!

In this important conversation between Marcia and Deborah, they provide valuable lessons on leadership, resilience, and creating a thriving organizational culture. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a team leader, or someone navigating personal and professional challenges, this episode offers inspiration and practical advice for fostering a positive work environment that will hold fast against life’s obstacles.

To learn more about the podcast and Marcia Barnes’ book Here We Grow: The Marketing Formula to 10x Your Business and Transform Your Future, visit https://mathbeforemarketing.com/podcast/.

Key Takeaways

In this episode, you’ll takeaway leadership lessons on topics like:

The Power of Cultural Values: By focusing on core values like being healthy, hungry, humble, honorable, and smart, leaders can create an environment where employees feel valued and united, ultimately leading to a resilient and thriving organization.
Embracing and Overcoming Adversity: Deborah’s unwavering focus on problem-solving and her commitment to retaining talent rather than resorting to layoffs serve as powerful lessons for mission-driven leaders.
Inclusive Communication and Safe Environments: A significant takeaway for growth marketers and servant leaders is the importance of fostering an inclusive environment where all voices are heard.
Visionary Leadership and Strategic Exits: Deborah’s decision to exit her company, ensuring the buyer shared similar cultural values, and her achievement of an 80% above-market outcome highlight the importance of strategic vision and alignment in major business decisions.

Full Transcript

Introduction

Deborah Wood:

60% of our business went away overnight. That was in the middle of the year. And again, I talk about the confidence, the tenacity, you mentioned, just the realization that what we were doing, we were doing well, we were able to retool, keep all of our people employed.

We deployed them to different things around the company, infrastructure projects and elsewhere. But we retooled and we met plan by the end of the year.

From Here We Grow

Marcia Barnes:

I firmly believe that all meaningful change starts on the inside and works its way out. It takes time and a conscious effort to look within yourself to find the things that may be holding you back, and then address them in a healthy way. You’ve made agreements with yourself about what you expect and what you will accept in life. For many people, those ideas are hinged to the way you were brought up as a kid and not based in reality. They’re often built on things other people told you in school, kids, teachers, bullies, in broken relationships and in toxic situations, and maybe, probably, life’s little mistakes or big failures have created fear or confidence issues.

As a result, you may have accepted those things as truth when they were not. Identifying what those beliefs are and breaking them apart is what enables you to free yourself from these false agreements you made with yourself early in life. I find myself doing this kind of work all the time. If I feel anxious, I stop and ask myself, “What is this thing I’m experiencing?” The answers are all the same, “I’m fearing I’m not going to do this or that, and I’m ashamed of it. I’m going to miss a goal and I’m going to look bad. My reputation is going to be hurt when somebody says something about me missing that goal.” I run into thoughts like this all the time.

I think women especially are conscious of when somebody talks badly about them, we spend days ruminating about what he, she, they said, going over the how’s and the why’s, and what could have been done differently. I’ve learned that it just doesn’t matter and that you have to let it roll off your back. The people who will speak badly about you or try to tear you down are broken. You don’t have the time or energy to try and fix them, nor should you. Your job is to get clear on what it is you’re here to do, and then spend your time and head space in those spots.

Episode 12 Introduction

Narrator:

This is Here We Grow, a show for growth-minded leaders looking for transformational impact, hosted by Marcia Barnes.

In business, no amount of planning can prevent all the possible curveballs that may come your way.

In this episode of Here We Grow, Marcia speaks to Deborah Wood, Founder and Chairperson of the Board of Advisors for Avant Healthcare, about an inflection point for her business, and how she tackled it with confidence and with a company culture capable of withstanding a storm.

Marcia Barnes:

Welcome to the Here We Grow podcast. Today I’m with my good friend, Deborah Wood. Good morning, Deborah.

Deborah Wood:

Good morning. Thank you.

Marcia Barnes:

Welcome. Really appreciate you stopping by today. A fascinating story that you have in your business. We’ve known each other for 20 years, I think is when we met. We were both little babies in business, I think.

Deborah Wood:

Really.

Marcia Barnes:

And just the journey that you’ve gone down to build a significant, wonderful, culturally driven business, that you recently have exited from in a very healthy way for your team and the community. Just a great story that’s been coming about in you over the last 20 years. So an opportunity that our listeners enjoy hearing, how can they get from here to there, and their stories as well. So thanks for joining us.

Deborah Wood:

Well, thank you, and I’m excited to join the conversation. I love your book.

Marcia Barnes:

Thank you.

Deborah Wood:

So much of what you have messaged about your journey really resonates with me, so I’m looking forward to talking about it.

Marcia Barnes:

Well, we grew up in it together, so a lot of it is definitely both of our stories.

Deborah Wood:

Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Marcia Barnes:

And at the core of that, for you and for me and the different places I’ve been in leadership, culture has been the driving force of what’s important to us. I say in the book, I’ve always said this, that God’s created us with something in our hearts that’s trying to get out into the marketplace. And so the company’s culture tends to reflect that quite a bit. DWA & Associates is what I started knowing you as, and then you renamed that and rebranded. Walk us through how you started that, the journey on the brand, and then let’s talk about the cultural values that were important to you and your team.

Deborah Wood:

We are 31 years old. Started as Deborah Wood & Associates, branded then as DWA Healthcare Communications Group. There was a period of time where I had different storefronts, and more recently really honed in and focused on one of our brands, our premier brand, which is Avant Healthcare. And Avant Healthcare is a premier medical education and communication company. It has a, science is a differentiator, just real high science, and then supported with strategic insights, cutting-edge creative data to really provide the customer an experience in terms of medical education for their customers that’s very impactful and meaningful.

So we have had a very successful growth over the 30 years. When I was able to turn over the baton to the new owners, we were over 260 employees. And again, the culture is one of those earliest, I would say, components of the company, and not because I have an MBA and had a business plan that said, “I’m going to make culture this thing that differentiates us.” It really was authentic. It really was born from who I was and who our people were that we brought into the company. And we did have the opportunity to work for about seven, eight years before myself and another officer sat down and wanted to articulate what made us successful.

And in that period of time, we had had several curveballs, to use your terminology from the book, but one of those curveballs, we almost lost our opportunity to work for Lilly. In the 1990s they went to a preferred supplier network, and we had prior to that been able to walk the halls and get business and grow our business, but all of a sudden they were going to designate what suppliers could do that and who wasn’t going to be able to do that. We were so small at the time, we were only seven people, and we had only worked in a few of the marketing channels. And they were certainly looking for agencies much larger than us.

But the neat thing is, and coming back to our culture, the neat thing was that our clients along with ourselves really rallied, and we listened to them and we listened to what they said about us. That dialogue with them and then to procurement is what then came into that value conversation. This is what’s made us successful. This is what they value in our culture. This is what of course we value in our culture. Really in those early years it was very selfish, I wanted to have a wonderful place to come to every day and wanted to have people who felt like family, and really in their day to day had an experience that was special.

So creating those employee experiences just came natural. It wasn’t until maybe another five, six, seven years later that we realized it was a competitive advantage, because our clients wanted it too. They recognized that there’s something special in this culture and community, and they wanted us by their side. So I could talk for hours obviously about it, but I do think having a value driven culture, which we later formalized, we inspired, we hired to our values. We had specific questions and things that we were hoping to discern before people joined us. We wanted everyone to be a good fit for the culture, and certainly made some big decisions over the years where we had tough decisions.

One of the ones that always sticks out in my mind, we all have tough clients, and we all are professionals and know how to work with tough clients. Well, we had one that was tougher than tough, toxic, if you will, and was creating a hostile environment within our company. And we did all the things you could do, worked with them, worked with supervisors, tried to help coach our people, and there was no end to it. And you know your values are your values when they cost you something. And we ended up walking away from a $4 million account because we could not get it right with this client.

Marcia Barnes:

What were the core values of the company? And then let’s talk about which ones of those guided this decision the most.

Deborah Wood:

Very good. Well, healthy is one of the first ones that come to mind, and certainly healthy has a lot of components to it, but I think again, just employee health in a couple of different directions, but also healthy relationships and fitness and all those things. Hungry. Hungry is an interesting word. We use that word to name some of that ambition, hungry to learn, hungry to innovate, the hungry to go as far as we could in accomplishing the client’s objectives, all those kind of things.

The client ends up being in every one of our value columns when you start looking down the different descriptors, but also learning is in every one of our values. Healthy, hungry, humble, honorable and smart. So honorable, I think that this is one that again, just is maybe an obvious one to folks, but really it’s hard in both inside the company and outside the company to think about how you present yourself honorably in every situation, transparent. Failure, when you have your failures, being honest about your failures.

Certainly taking those failures in a smart way forward to learn from them and grow from them. But there’s a lot of components to being honorable. I’m leaving humble for last, in a moment here. But smart, again, smart has a lot to do with, yes, we have PhDs and all sorts of MBAs, and all sorts of folks who are really, really experts at what they do. But smart’s also about managing change, embracing change. Again, inventing, innovation, being able to just lean into situations and articulate new ideas.

And not be afraid to cause the waves of change to happen, not just be one who embraces change but causes change. Humble. Humble, I certainly feel a little bit like I’m not being humble right now, but humble, it was an interesting journey with that because I saw a lot of agencies really promoting themselves aways and being central to whatever that activity was. And sometimes we tried that out a little bit, but we were more about our customer’s brand, the educational activity, the faculty.

We tried to be more of that partner versus the central company, that. And humble, again, is really being able to, I guess, really represent all the other values in a way that’s honest and authentic. So again, there’s so many avenues in which I could talk about these. I think an overarching way, sometimes I describe the culture is to say we have a culture of excellence, and excellence born from a lot of these things I just talked, and a culture of caring.

So then when you dig into the values, you see that as well, where we talk about how we care for each other, how we learn from each other, how we want to a team, teaming’s very important, all these other aspects of a caring environment. And of course you can see that also on how we express ourselves through community and outreach, and personal endeavors, versus just the business endeavors too.

Marcia Barnes:

Right. So in dismissing a large client like that, who’s toxic, certainly healthy in your culture, a client who is toxic is not healthy to themselves, if you look at it on both sides, right?

Deborah Wood:

Right.

Marcia Barnes:

Toxicity from a client causes you to start doing what the client tells you to do instead of what you know needs to be done. Right?

Deborah Wood:

Absolutely.

Marcia Barnes:

So the smart part of your culture then drops out because now they’re responding to a demand generated type request.

Deborah Wood:

Absolutely.

Marcia Barnes:

And then the health of your own team and trying to deal with that certainly has a challenge in it too. The humility piece, if you have the humility piece and the other party doesn’t have any of that, that becomes a victim situation pretty quickly. So I can see where that would’ve guided those decisions.

Deborah Wood:

Right.

Marcia Barnes:

Did you find, because I had the same situation in 2020. Think about COVID, we lost 35% of the top line revenue in six weeks. The sky is falling all around the world, and our largest client got in the same space. And I ended up having that same conversation with them. And after it was done, it was almost like a euphoria around the office happened, that we were fearless enough to say, “No, this is causing problems.” Because ultimately if you have a toxic client, whoever’s managing that account is turnover risk.

Deborah Wood:

Yes. Yes.

Marcia Barnes:

And now I’ve got to change 10 clients’ account managers because one person was an asshole. So what did you notice about your culture after you did that?

Deborah Wood:

Absolutely what you said, and I mean we were already unified in that decision, but it was a conversation that just kept going on about, “Wow, we really did that.” And then it became the story that was told to candidates who were going to be hired into the company, to obviously other employees, just the sharing just kept going and kept going. And for, I think this was eight years ago, and it just kept going. People were so proud of it that we really did that, and that we valued our culture and our people, and backed them up and supported them that way. Even though I’m not there when I have my get-togethers with folks, it still comes up sometimes. We really did that.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah, a defining moment for your business.

Deborah Wood:

It wasn’t a very defining moment.

Marcia Barnes:

And all of the rallying around that too.

Deborah Wood:

Right. Right.

Marcia Barnes:

Now, when I met you in around the early 2000s, we were in a peer group coaching company, the alternative board, sometimes known as TAB.

Deborah Wood:

TAB, love that.

Marcia Barnes:

So think of it as Vistage or similar to Young Presidents’ Organization, or places where you’ve got a group of business owners that are meeting together regularly to help one another with best practices and insights. And that was the first place I met you. And so you had hit another one of these inflection points that you call it, curveballs in my world, at that time, and I kind of walked away from the table going, “I’m probably never going to see her again.” But through your tenacity and grit, you scrapped your way back together and kept moving on. What was that one like, how did the culture support you there?

Deborah Wood:

Yeah, and it’s fun to hear that you remember that period for us, and those were in the early years. And I think in those early years, curveballs were inflection points, just getting to know the industry. A little naive, didn’t see it coming. Didn’t see it coming. And some people say, “Well, you should have saw it coming.” But I was quickly in thinking about all the curveballs, and I’m going to come back to that, but we had so many, that one had to do with a regulatory change, and-

Marcia Barnes:

Right. Those are fun.

Deborah Wood:

There’s some scrutiny on our clients on a certain set of programs and how they interacted with healthcare professionals. And it was our bread-and-butter service offering, and overnight, because again, we wanted to basically make sure we were in the spirit of the law performing, these programs were canceled. So 60% of our business went away overnight. That was in the middle of the year. And again, I talk about the confidence, the tenacity you mentioned, just the realization that what we were doing we were doing well, we were able to retool, keep all of our people employed.

We deployed them to different things around the company, infrastructure projects and elsewhere. But we retooled and we met plan by the end of the year. But some of the other curveballs, patent expiration of our customer’s products, again, those we see coming now, but in the early years they really caught us off guard. I already mentioned the toxic client. Mergers and acquisitions of our customers, sometimes we fell on the outside of that. Ransomware attack, we had a huge ransomware attack. The competition surprised us. There were some curveballs there and certainly technology, the pandemic being one that we all experienced.

Marcia Barnes:

And if I remember right, your ransomware attack was before it was cool to have a ransomware attack.

Deborah Wood:

That was a tough one.

Marcia Barnes:

Isn’t that early on? Yeah.

Deborah Wood:

And thinking about all the stuff, and that kind of goes back to culture and community again, I think what I remember about every one of these, and this was before we really understood that we should be grateful for curveballs, but there was the very dark time where again, it was exhausting. The perils were overwhelming. I mean you’re thinking about people’s livelihoods and whether you’re going to have to let people go. I’m worried about my leadership in those periods of time because the pressures on them were insurmountable. And just the uncertainty, the uncertainty, you’re working very hard to survive it, and just write it off as a bad experience. But that was the early years.

What we came to learn was that you’re not going to survive it, you’re going to thrive. Because these, again, inflection points, these curveballs often are a catalyst for change. And I think those, I would say nine out of 10 times, if not all the time, we came out a different company, a better company, a stronger company, and a company who had learned and progressed and transformed. And I do think that companies who have a strong culture, they have a foundation of values, they’ve got resilience. You’re surrounding yourself with really strong people and people who are learners, willing to take chances, willing to fail for it, all those kind of things, you’re always going to come out a better company.

Marcia Barnes:

Right. Well, the smart and humble company can do that, can look at the curveballs in the not-so-fun spaces they’ve been through, and create strength out of that, without being smart. And if there’s no humility, you don’t have that.

Deborah Wood:

Right. I talked about fun, and you mentioned fearless. Fearless and fun kind of go together with me. I think during these periods of time, one of the things I used to say to my officers is, “It’s a good time to play a prank on somebody,” or make people laugh. Let them see you laughing. It shows that you’re fearless, and by the way, it shows you’re confident too if you’re having fun in the midst in all of this. So fun was a very important part of how we basically expressed ourselves, if you will, just to make sure that part of that community is friendship. And friendship comes with bonding over fun as well.

Marcia Barnes:

Right. The most precious metals, the things of the most value in this world are the ones that gain their value by putting it under pressure or heat, the refining of gold or copper, all of the different metals, heat and pressure are the things.

Deborah Wood:

Yeah, that’s a very good point, because again, I think of that pressure too, in those times we have a curveball, it creates a sense of urgency too, and clarity that sometimes you don’t have when that pressure’s not there. And that sense of urgency is very uniting too, everyone’s together with it, and it helps you to progress further and faster than you would maybe in ordinary circumstances.

Marcia Barnes:

Right. And in a business, it’s rare that the curveball or the inflection point can be handled by just you. It takes the smartness of a team to be able to solve for that. You’ve probably seen that with your team in the past too.

Deborah Wood:

Absolutely.

Marcia Barnes:

It can be lonely being the CEO, but you can’t do it all, right?

Deborah Wood:

No, you cannot. Absolutely not. And I do think empowering your… As we’ve, again, progressed into understanding those things that really were foundational to our culture. One of the things we wanted to make sure is people had the courage to share their ideas, disagree, maybe even debate and argue a point. So we train on that behavior.

Some people call it psychological safety, there’s other terms for it, but we wanted to make sure that we didn’t lose that individualism. What people could bring to every situation, whether it be a curveball or a development of an innovative idea, or a customer solution, never feel like as part of the team that you can’t speak out and contribute. And they all had something to bring, and we wanted everyone to bring it.

Marcia Barnes:

I’d like to dig a little deeper on that point because it’s something that I find people struggle with. How do you get team members to be bold with their voice to represent their voice on a team? Often there’s a fear of retribution from someone senior, from being thought less of by your co-workers, by disagreeing or arguing a point or bringing up something you see that’s not right. I tend to value that, but I seem to see still a lot of fear around it, and maybe it’s something I’m doing that’s causing that. It couldn’t possibly be, I don’t think. No, I’m just kidding. But trying to understand what part of it is on me and what part of it can we help people learn and develop around. How do you get that part strengthened in your team?

Deborah Wood:

Yeah. Well, again, there were some modules and formal education that starts with the management, the leadership and the management, because you have to demonstrate it first of all, and then you also have to know what you can and can’t do that could potentially inspire it or squash it. So training management on how to create an environment where people feel free to speak is very important. And you talk to it. I mean, I used to say to folks, if I come out of a leadership team meeting and everybody was like, “Yeah, everything’s great, and we’re all getting along and everybody agrees on everything.” I’m thinking, “Something’s wrong here,” because I know there’s some differences.

So it’s those kind of things. But I think one of the things that management absolutely can do more of is take a little bit more time to ask the questions, even if you know the answers. It’s a very simple thing. Encourage that kind of contributing, so you make sure that everyone has an opportunity to speak. If you have someone who’s jumping in and answering and contributing to every part of the conversation, ask them, “Hang on a second, I want to hear from Joan over here.” So you have to kind of orchestrate it, if you will. And then things like, you can’t have retribution.

That to me is a personnel issue, if you have a manager who did something like that or another team member. This has to be a safe environment all the time for people so that they can speak out. Knowing, again, I always liken work relationships like marriage, you’re going to have disagreements, you’re going to have arguments. You’re going to have some things that you absolutely are different about, do differently. But that doesn’t mean that the relationship is not going to be still a good relationship. You have to accept, so it’s just making sure people understand how to allow that to happen in the team environment with the supervisor, et cetera.

Marcia Barnes:

Right. That’s very helpful. Thank you for that. I also think that when I look at your cultural values and how you were leading that way, you can have disagreement, and at the end of the day you still both value the same things. When the values are shared and bought into, then we can handle the discord that comes out of that.

Deborah Wood:

Absolutely.

Marcia Barnes:

If you don’t have those guideposts and that shared acceptance of, “This is who I am as a part of this organization,” it’s very difficult to have good, healthy disagreements, in my opinion.

Deborah Wood:

100 percent.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah. I can see where you guys’ culture really supported that a lot.

So cultural values, very, very, very good. I know something you were driving out of those was that people felt a sense of belonging and felt valued at the company, and that their work was important, and changing lives internally, externally, around their community. How did you see that manifest itself?

Deborah Wood:

Two points I want to make there. I think I’m going to talk to the meaningfulness of their work, first of all, probably halfway through our life, maybe at the 15-year mark, really started seeing that we were having an impact on patient care in a bigger and bigger way. In other words, partnering with our customers, which was an honor to do, to deliver this important medical education, the scientific information into the thoughtful minds and caring hearts of healthcare professionals was making a difference in patients’ lives. Well, our frontline saw that, our account leads and our account managers and folks that are working directly with the client, but not all the company appreciated, “Yeah, we’re not doctors. We don’t treat patients.”

No, we have an important role here. So we made it visible to them. And we had a theme one year where we talked about who we were fighting for, what are we fighting for? And we asked everybody in the company, this was at an annual meeting, to think about either themselves or a loved one, or a friend, someone who is sitting in that doctor’s office and needing a important decision made about their health, maybe a life and death decision, and that you want them to have, that doctor to have everything they need, the data, the information, the resources, the tools, everything they need to make the best decision for you or your loved one.

Bringing those real people into their minds, and bringing this into an annual meeting. And then we brought people up to talk on the stage about their personal stories, and then we said, “Okay, it takes every one of us to usher this out the door. It takes our accounts payable person, it takes technology over here. It takes all of us to keep this company running, to usher this out our door. Every one of you are touching the patient.” And it took off. People understood it. So the meaning of being able to improve patients’ lives, their outcomes, their quality of life was very important in that regard.

Marcia Barnes:

That’s a remarkable place to be working, having that kind of impact.

Deborah Wood:

I think that the meaning in everyone’s jobs and just the being able to have, and I do think that, I’m not an expert on millennials or anything like that, but I have heard that having meaning in your job is one of those at the top of the list right now. Certainly your circumstances, who you work for, who you work with, maybe not so important is paycheck. It’s all these other things.

Marcia Barnes:

Well, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs covered belonging, needing to feel part of something, was the third level, I believe, on the Maslow hierarchy of needs. So some things, I mean, that’s been around for 60, 70 years I think, that’s a pretty old construct, but when you look at what people say millennials want, it’s pretty much on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Deborah Wood:

That’s interesting. That’s cool.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah. So definitely values are driving those outcomes in the business, and we’re going to come back to that in a bit. I want to cover how we handle curveballs and what the output of that is. So in the book I talk about life’s going to send you curveballs. You’ve had them, I’ve had them, everyone who’s listening to this has had them. A broken relationship, a change in a business, getting terminated from a job, having your job cut, getting a different boss, your best friend at work leaves.

There’s all these things that come at you that you weren’t expecting. And how you respond to those is typically where success lies. So I’ve found that for me, being grateful for the curveball is my first step. Secondly, acknowledging that every experience I’ve had in life so far has prepared me for this moment in time to get through that. The third one would be that who can help coach me through this, who’s experienced it before or knows something about this.

Deborah Wood:

Absolutely.

Marcia Barnes:

The peer group coaching that you and I have both participated in, we’re both in the Alliance Forum, we met in the Alternative Board. Having those types of resources is something to use during those times. And then asking yourself, “Who will you serve by getting through this, and how can I give?” So that’s kind of my go-to list. As you’ve gone through these things, I certainly have seen you at these inflection points, be grateful.

You’ve always been a person of gratitude, that tends to be your first response to things. And then looking, I think you’ve had a good deck of experiences to look back on. You’ve surrounded yourself with great people and great coaches to handle that. What are your findings on how you process these things, and what is the outcome that happens? Because obviously you get through them, your business has thrived. What have you become in the process of handling those inflection points?

Deborah Wood:

I do think, and again, all your commentary in your books just so resonate with me, I think that early on didn’t understand that the curveballs were going to make me better. I’ll just put it pretty simple. Once that reoccurred time and time again, there is almost even an excitement to solve. And a little bit of the entrepreneur, but we know that we have an immense amount of ideas. So it becomes very, I don’t want to say scientific, but it becomes, there is an approach that we all probably have different from someone else, but absolutely surrounding yourself with all the people you need.

You need to have the people who it’s going to impact the most and the people who are experts in whatever the area of topic or curveball may be happening. So you have, and again, it’s just probably good research practice, just to have all of your information that you need at your fingertips, and a process. And of course, I have a project management background, so you approach it with a very important process. You’re always evaluating, “Is this working? Is it not working because it was a bad plan, or is it not working because it was bad implementation?” You have to constantly be asking questions and assessing it.

But I think personally, there’s a sense of confidence that is always there once you see how you come out of these curveballs and become stronger. And that confidence is so important for everyone to see that you have, and then hopefully they’re also feeling that confidence because they’ve been through it now so many times with you, and being able to talk about things in a positive way about failure, risks, risk mitigation. You can talk about those in a way that’s not foreboding, it’s like, “Things are going to go bad.”

It could be very positive, “Well, we have a risk here. Now let’s look at the three ways we’re going to solve that, and what are the problems that one’s going to cause if we do it that way.” And everyone gets very intrigued with this process. So while you’re sitting under whatever the perils are, you have this energy, and this energy to solve that is, I think, important to encourage, and to let happen. Giving people ownership to pieces of it. You’ve already said it, you can’t do it yourself. I love to see people rise up and take ownership and run with it. Just that excites me, and learning to let them do it their way and not your way.

But coming out of those in a way that absolutely is so tangible that everyone would see that we come out stronger, that the experience was uniting, that we had a sense of urgency that really made that clarity of purpose even more clear. When people see that, it’s just like, “Wow.” I remember after the ransomware, just as an example, someone said, “Well, maybe we should have a ransomware attack once a year. This is really credible what happened, what we did the last couple of days.” We had to recreate work, we did not pay the ransom, by the way, and so we were locked down. So we had to recreate a tremendous amount of work in the course of a couple of days. So everybody just had to stop and build. It was amazing.

Marcia Barnes:

You had one of these inflection points, and I forget what the root cause was, but perhaps you could share that. But it was one of these that we all dread to hit in business where we lose revenue at a drastic pace, maybe a big client. And you have to make the decision about, it’s not even a decision about whether you’re going to let people go, but who are you going to let go? It is what most people, most businesses will go automatically to there. But you didn’t do that, you went to, “How can we keep this team together and replace that revenue?” Could you talk through that a bit? Because that was definitely one of these spots for you.

Deborah Wood:

Right. Well, I will qualify, in 31 years we had one workforce reduction, but it wasn’t because of… It was not a curveball, it was we had some bad planning on our own behalf, in terms of the direction we were going to go. We did some changes in our service offerings and what have you. So I would call it more of, there was some job elimination, but it was just a very few people. So that was a very thoughtful process, very painful for me, because I never wanted to have to do that. When you hire the right people and you hire people who are learners, it is especially the last couple of decades for me, very feasible to train them and to move them into other positions.

Now, I do think that there’s some limitations on that, because we have scientists and technologists and people with very strong backgrounds, that you can’t learn it in a matter of, over the shoulders, if you will. But at the same time, there was ways to deploy people where they could bring value, and it would make the company stronger. A lot of infrastructure roles came from some of these situations, where we would have a very strong individual over maybe, and I’m making a scenario up, over here in account management, and that client, actually this did happen. We had a decline in some client’s business. That person became a trainer in our people division, our human resource division. So you’re able to do some of that, but there’s also the confidence that you’re going to grow. It’s one of those little dips in your growth chart.

Marcia Barnes:

Because growth’s not linear.

Deborah Wood:

It’s not linear.

Marcia Barnes:

It kind of is this jagged line that over time it goes up to the right, that you’re going to hit these things.

Deborah Wood:

And I can’t tell you how many times I would say to my officers, I understand, again, you have this year plan, this twelve-month plan, and everybody’s working hard to optimize the plan, but next year you have confidence that next year this is going to continue to grow, then you don’t want to make a change now that will then inhibit that growth next year. So just keeping that in front of everybody, you got to have confidence that this is still going to happen. Look at the past.

Marcia Barnes:

But it sounds to me like your theme that was winding through that experience was you were asking the question, “Not, who do we cut, but how do we keep?” It was the how-to drumbeat that you were rolling through that culture that was looking for the right solutions for everybody.

Deborah Wood:

Absolutely. I always empowered my officers, my leaders, to manage to the talent. And I say talent in that way, not people. Because sometimes there were folks who weren’t a good fit on both sides, we weren’t a good fit for them or they weren’t a good fit for us. So we weren’t void of letting people go, but those were different circumstances. It was never because of a revenue line. So it was just those were business decisions, good business decisions. But still prior to that, we called them Get Well, they were put on Get Well plans, and we worked 90 days with them. And again, a very documented process by which we did everything we could to help them succeed, before making those decisions.

Marcia Barnes:

Right. That’s great. A great story. And a defining moment for your company as well.

Deborah Wood:

Right. Right.

Marcia Barnes:

So you have on our handling curveballs and aligning that with culture, we have a process for getting through those that I encourage people get grateful about the curveball, look at your past experiences, who can coach you? How do you serve others and give out of this scenario? When that’s underpinned by a very strong culture like you’ve had, it seems like all the resources of heaven and earth come together to help point out the solutions. I hit one of these personally, my personal and professional life I hit one of these a few years ago.

It was a very, very tough couple of months at the beginning, which is where this whole curveball process gets refined at. But a few days after the incident happened that I’m in the middle of, I’m at church, and the pastor is talking about how to get through life’s unexpected things that happen to you. And he’s giving a list, and his second point was, “Who can you talk to that’s had that experience before?” So this point number two that I wrote in my book, actually now that I think about was plagiarized from my pastor. Really sorry about that.

But I always take notes in church, and sometimes I get out there with some really good stuff. So on my notes I was listing, “Who could I talk to about this thing?” And there was a high profile, very well known across the country, a woman CEO here in our city, leading a publicly traded company, that had been through a similar situation. And I was like, “Well, she went through it last year. She could help me.” But I had no idea who I knew that could get me in front of her. And very little hope of it. Do you know I met her in the church doorway that day, after writing down her name and acknowledging that I needed to meet her. She was a member of the church, and I didn’t even know that.

Deborah Wood:

Wow. You know who made that happen.

Marcia Barnes:

Oh, yeah. And you don’t exactly have to be in church every time it happens, but the magical starts to happen. And your journey has been as an outsider looking in, I hope you know this, but it’s been very magical, and a blessing to many. So you started this from zero and grew it to 275 employees. And of course, when you’re a substantial company like that, your vendors are growing.

Deborah Wood:

Absolutely.

Marcia Barnes:

Your outside contractors are growing. Thousands and thousands of people are impacted by what you’ve created. And with this strong culture backing it up and having gotten through, showing the ability to be sustainable and grow, you make the decision that you’re ready to exit the company. And you end up creating 80% above market outcome on your exit. How much do you think of that was contributed to that gap that you got 80% more for your company than average? So think about all the companies that are below average, how much has this impacted that outcome?

Deborah Wood:

When we went out to market, and I had my six officers with me on this journey, and by the way, we were looking at very important criteria, strategic criteria and cultural fit. Set that aside. We were blown away how many, there was, I can’t even tell you how many companies were interested now, but 30 some companies were interested in us, and how well we were known, how much people knew of us and our excellence in our culture. I remember going into it thinking our brand was not as well known.

We weren’t nationally known like some of the really big agencies, but everybody knew us. So it had a huge difference. They knew of us. They knew of what to expect from us, and we had specific questions about the culture and the community. And a lot of these companies where we kind of honed it down, my banker who was helping me knew that culture was important, he only bought companies who had cultural similarities to it, kind of like-minded, and that culture was important, and wanted a company that believed in a value-driven business.

Marcia Barnes:

So he wanted someone who fit his culture, but he also wanted somebody who had a strong, established, abundant culture as well. Right?

Deborah Wood:

Right.

Marcia Barnes:

I wonder how hard that was for him to find. You had to be a unicorn to him.

Deborah Wood:

Yeah. Well, you used my word. I thought finding the company I wanted to pass the baton to was going to be a unicorn.

Marcia Barnes:

And you know who did that.

Deborah Wood:

But we found one, we found a wonderful company, 10 times our size. And sometimes people ask me, “Well, why didn’t you do something else? Why did you sell?” And some of that is from the strategic side of that decision. We did have a need to have a global footprint. We wanted to have more expansive opportunity for clients, for careers and ambitions, and there were some capabilities that we could benefit from AI, big data and analytics. And the company that we finally chose as our, I say chose, we chose as our own because we did have multiple interest, brought all that to Avant, and it’s definitely going to help Avant soar. So very excited.

So very important that they were fed both strategically and culturally in this, and we succeeded. I know what I was going to talk to earlier too, when you were mentioning belonging, and I think again, all of this I think, it resonates to me about the individual and the culture and the career in terms of being a part of something, feeling that you are not just a part of it, you belong to it I guess. To that word belong. So a lot of people have their diversity inclusion groups and programs and committees and steering committees and all of that. Well, we knew that that was important, and we had a diversity inclusion group, but we realized that we needed to take it further.

It wasn’t about just diversity inclusion. It was getting to that result of everybody in the company felt like they belonged. How do you do that? And one of the things that we recognize, especially in this last maybe five years, that there’s a lot of divisiveness in the world and some of what we could bring into a diversity inclusion program might even leave people out, if you will. So we chose to be apolitical, no politics, and we chose not to take social stances. Instead, we wanted to educate, and we used our diversity inclusion, and we added the word belonging. So it was called DIBs, was the acronym.

We used it to educate on each other’s differences. And we had a monthly, they still do a monthly webinar, and if it’s women’s history month, someone will present on that. Just all different ethnic groups, different classes of people. But it’s education, never taking a social stance or a political stance. And in that way, we took away, and it could be something as simple as, “Why do you always wear a scarf over your head?” And if you’re Indian or whatever. And it’s explaining things that make people more comfortable to be around each other.

And then of course, much deeper than that as well in terms of the religions and what have you. But belonging is important. And it was a very, I think it takes more effort to not want to take a position sometimes in a socially heated period of time than it does not to take a position. Because I can’t tell you how many times officers and myself had to bite our tongues until we bled, not to say what we believed. But you want people to, for every one opinion out there, there’s another opinion that’s different. And we wanted people to belong.

Marcia Barnes:

Because otherwise you’re asking them to leave part of themselves at home. That’s not belonging.

Deborah Wood:

Exactly. Yeah. We wanted them to feel safe. Safe.

Marcia Barnes:

And that they were in an abundant environment where there were opportunities abounding.

Deborah Wood:

Right. And that these things would not make them different if spoken about, or leave them out.

Marcia Barnes:

Right. So transaction completed less than 12 months ago.

Deborah Wood:

Five.

Marcia Barnes:

Five months ago.

Deborah Wood:

February.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah. What I did when I left a big role like that, took a year off for rest and recuperation and recovery, and to really get clear on who I was at that point before I made a lot of decisions about what I would do going forward. So you’ve still got some time here, you’re in that part where you’re taking time with family and yourself. Any ideas of where you think that’ll lead you?

Deborah Wood:

Oh, gosh. It is really hard. I think that I’m still unwinding.

Marcia Barnes:

Sure. It’s stressful, especially the exit of a sale of a business is a lot. There’s a lot involved in that.

Deborah Wood:

Right. And still engaging a little bit with some of my former officers, and you’re talking with them, maybe more just in a supportive role. But I think that I’m moving towards more of wanting to not necessarily be in a leadership role, it’s more in a charitable role, an outreach role where I can have some one-on-one opportunities to help individuals. And I’m not going to probably close off any avenue at this point, but I’m not starting another business. Absolutely not. But at the same time, just even having this conversation, you think about what you could bring to the table that might help another, a young entrepreneur, someone who is… So maybe there’ll be some opportunity.

Marcia Barnes:

Can you be that person in the church doorway? Yeah.

Deborah Wood:

Exactly. So hoping to do a lot more with my church and-

Marcia Barnes:

Family.

Deborah Wood:

Family.

Marcia Barnes:

I know you’ve talked about the kids.

Deborah Wood:

Absolutely. My grandchildren are my joy, and keeping me very busy right now. Catching up on a lot. I told this story many times when my children were little and the company was growing so fast. My husband would take them down to the airport, and oftentimes they’d see my plane leaving and come. But they got in the habit of every time they saw an airplane they would go, “Mommy, up there.”

Marcia Barnes:

And that’s probably something you could really help our listeners with. We have had several really fantastic women leaders, women business owners in this podcast. And these young ladies are out there trying to do it all. They’re parenting, they’re running businesses, they’re working in businesses, they’re part of communities. They’re part of a bigger family, an extended family. Some are dealing with aging parents, some are doing single mom roles. All of it is hard, right? You and I have talked about this for years, about the whole, we’ve never, I don’t think, agreed, not necessarily with one another, but where people want to put work-life balance. My opinion is that’s a tenuous spot because balance means you’re staying very equal, equally. And that’s tenacious, right? Or difficult.

Deborah Wood:

I like to call it work-life integration, because you don’t stop being a mom at eight o’clock and start being a mom at five o’clock. You’ve got stuff going on all day long, the school calls, a doctor’s appointment, thinking about it, likewise, after 5:00 you may have client needs and other things, deadlines that have to continue the work through the evening. So it’s an integration, it’s making it all work together, but not where one begins and ends. But I think your curveballs just are amazing compared to I think some of what I think about in my life.

And I just totally respect how you faced all of your curveballs. But parenting is a challenge. And in addition to parenting, while the company was growing, my elderly mother lived with us and lived with us until she died, and she had her health ailments and dementia in her latter years. So very, very difficult. It goes right back to everything I always say, you can’t do it alone. And thank the Lord, I had a lot of my family, my brother, my sisters, my husband, a lot of people helping.

I guess the message there is, there’s always unfortunately going to be compromise in these situations, because I used to say family first, but as a leader especially, you know that you can’t forsake what’s happening over here with your employees and your company and your clients, and put family completely first. But you can compromise and make sure that you’re attempting to have the best outcome from both. And I always just say, especially after my mother died, I thought about, and maybe even lamented a little bit, the could’ve, should’ve, should have done this differently, better, spent more time with… So on and so forth.

You can’t do that. You got to just give yourself the freedom to recognize that you did the best you could, that again, and then focus on what you should be grateful for, that you had the opportunity to help to be a part of, to spend that time with, in my case, my mom in her last years. And of course all the things that from that helps you to grow as a person. But being a parent, my kids were in high school and college while my mother was living with us. There’s just so much going on in the company was going, whoosh.

Marcia Barnes:

You’re not going to get it all done.

Deborah Wood:

You’re not.

Marcia Barnes:

The sooner you accept that, that the world will tell you you need to do this and this and this and this. And what I’ve found for myself, and I coach other women this way too, it doesn’t matter what you do, it matters who you are. You could do all these things for, children are typically the primary spot, but for a spouse or an aging parent or the church or the community, fill in the blank.

You could check all the boxes, but if you’re not becoming your best self, you’re not going to be as good as you could be to them. And with children, they’re going to become who you are, not the things you did. But I just find so many people weigh themselves down with feeling like they’re not enough because they can’t check all those boxes.

Deborah Wood:

Or be on the PTO. You have to prioritize. You have to know where your strengths are and when you can bring the most value, and then understand again where your limits are. And I do think that, you mentioned perfection in the book, “You can’t let perfect get in the way of good.” Is that the phrase?

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah. “Perfect is the enemy, good-“

Deborah Wood:

“Perfect is the enemy of good.” And I think that that is such a valuable phrase. And the other thing I used to tell people, because you end up, and with a lot of, I’ll use the word perfectionist, people who just excel and want to continue to excel, and excel and excel. And I used to tell people, “Don’t pass the point of relevancy. Is that now going to add any more value to this point here? Stop here. Point of relevancy.” So it’s really understanding that and knowing yourself, and knowing that, “I got to reel myself in now.” Yeah, you could do these five extra things, but think about what you have to give up to do those five extra things.

Marcia Barnes:

Right. Deborah, this has been a wonderful conversation. I think this is going to be life-changing for a lot of people as they listen to it. Thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been a privilege to be in the audience of your life.

Deborah Wood:

Marcia, back at you. Thank you so much for doing this. And thank you for your book. And thank you just for the inspiration that you give so many people for all that you’re doing in your life and your business and with your employees, your career is just phenomenal.

Marcia Barnes:

Thank you. We’re all in it to win it, right?

Deborah Wood:

Yes. All in it to win it.

Marcia Barnes:

So thank you very much.

Audio:

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Deborah Wood: Overcoming Adversity With Avant Healthcare’s Strong Workplace Culture

Here We Grow

Episode 12

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Episode 12 Introduction