Building a culture that attracts and retains the right talent is not an easy task. There is a lot of theory and discussion around this, but translating theory and discussion into practical reality can be very difficult. Accurately reflecting the culture in the employer brand and recruitment process is an additional challenge.
My guest this week is Matt Jung co-founder of Comfort Research, the company behind the “Big Joe” range of products. Matt shares an incredibly honest account of his company’s journey to build a culture and establish a set of core values that guide everything they do and help them attract and retain the people they need to grow their business.
In the interview, we discuss:
- Identifying core values and how Comfort Research got it wrong the first time
- Rewarding behavior that champions core values
- Using core values in the recruiting process
- Why leaders should always be recruiting
- Recruiters as “culture concierges.”
Matt also talks about what has surprised him most about building his business and what the future holds for Comfort Research.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:00:56]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 221 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Building a culture that attracts and retains the right talent is not an easy task. There’s lots of theory and discussion around this, but translating theory into a practical reality can be very difficult. Properly reflecting culture and employer, brand and in the recruiting process is also an additional challenge. My guest this week is Matt Jung, co founder of Comfort Research, the company behind the Big Joe range of shares an incredibly honest account of his company’s journey to build a culture and establish a set of core values that guide everything they do and help them attract and retain the people they need to grow their business. Enjoy the interview. Hi Matt and welcome to the podcast.
Matt Jung [00:01:53]:
Hello. Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:01:56]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Matt Jung [00:02:02]:
Sure. My name is Matt Jung and I’m co founder of Comfort Research. We’re best known for our Big Joe brand of consumer products. We do beanbags, we do pool floats, we do kids furniture, we do outdoor furniture, all kinds of, well, pretty much anything. That’s awesome.
Matt Alder [00:02:17]:
Tell us a little bit more about the company. What’s your story? How did you get to where you are today?
Matt Jung [00:02:22]:
Well, I started the company in 1996 with my friend and business partner, Chip George, as we were attending Hope College, a small college here in Michigan, and had this idea for this shredded foam beanbag style chair. We started, you know, screwing around and making, making a few and immediately it was one of those things that we knew we had something. People would come over, they’d check, you know, check this beanbag, you know, out, and everyone would kind of rave, you know, about it and like, hey, can you make me one? And I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and I always knew that was going to be my path. And the great thing about being in college and being an entrepreneur is you got nothing to lose. So Chip and I went for it. And we started making these and we sold to other college students and we opened up a small store and an outlet mall. And by the time we graduated, we had a little bit in sales and we went after it full time. You know, fast forward, you know, over the years we added some bean bag type of product where this original product was a shredded foam type of chair. We added the bean bags and then we got, you know, a little bit more sophisticated and we got, you know, started doing some shapes for beanbags so that you could have arms and a back. And so we really started engineering the covers for a lot of, you know, value and to be able to create shape. And then, you know, as we expanded that, we got into some outdoor, some floating product. And now most recently, we’ve developed some molding technology that we’re applying to our products where we’re taking some of these foams that we’re using for beanbags and we’re molding those into shapes, whether it’s for furniture frame or for something else, to be able to make more new kinds of stuff. And we’re just having a blast doing it. So we are a big Joe is the brand. And you can find our stuff@buybigjoe.com, but most of our stuff goes through our retail partners. So we sell to folks like Walmart and Target and Costco and Sam’s Club, Amazon, of course, and get after it that way.
Matt Alder [00:04:40]:
Great stuff. So tell me about the people part of the company. What kind of people challenges do you have in terms of recruiting and retention?
Matt Jung [00:04:51]:
Well, we were pretty lucky from the sense that we’ve always surrounded ourselves with people that were willing to give up their time to help guide us and, you know, give us advice and, you know, one of the things that came up early on with one of our business partners, George Julius, as he had an experience at his previous companies where he felt that the culture was really the differentiating factor of why those companies had success. Now in the early days, we didn’t do much about culture or core values, but it was on our mind. And as we started really growing, and this is going back to about seven years, we had always been a pretty high growth company, but we kind of took it into the stratosphere about seven years ago. As we started growing, we started hiring leaders. And as these leaders are coming in, it changed the way that Chip and I had to work. I mean, in the early days we made the chairs, we sold the chairs, we swept the floors, we did the accounting. I mean, we did everything well. Now we’re hiring these leaders to come in. And so we had to figure out how to do a better job with this new role that we had so that we could empower these folks to do what they needed to do to get their jobs done. Not have a heavy hand watching over them, but still giving them some guidelines on this is how we want to operate. And so it first started in about 2011. So George Julius, that business partner I mentioned earlier, he so kindly suggested to Chip and I that we should go out and look at creating a strategic plan. We’d never done one in 15 years of doing business at that point. Well, 14 years, whatever. 14 years of doing business, we had never done a strategic plan. So what do you do when you got to go out and figure out how to do something for the first time? Well, you go out and get a little education on it. So we spent a couple of days in Chicago and learning how to put together the traditional strategic plan. And one of the things in there was talking about identifying your core values for an organization. They got the vision statement and the mission statement, and I’m not a big mission statement fan. Vision statements are great. I really like purpose statements more. And that really has been inspired by a book by Simon Sinek called Start with why. And he talks about, why do you do what you’re doing? How exactly are you doing it, and what exactly are you doing? Why your purpose? Right. Well, anyways, part of that, you know, purpose is our core values is the culture. And we did what most companies do when we first went out to try to identify our core values. We sat down with our leadership team. We sat down with other, you know, influencers within the organization, and we roundtabled it. We just asked the question, what are our core values? We came up with this list of 10 core values that we were very proud of. And one day I was given a tour to a banker. And, you know, like most companies, we had our core values posted on the wall. And I’m so proudly talking about how we’ve identified these core values. And I got to number seven out of ten, and I couldn’t list the final three. And how if we as leaders of companies, if we can’t remember the core values, there’s no way that they’re core. That is not what you’re trying to identify. And that kind of kicked off a process where, like, you know what? This isn’t working for us. We got to find a different way of doing this. How can we identify core values that are really true to us? You Know, I mean, we had things like on there that, you know, fun and innovation and, you know, ship on time and, you know, win, win negotiation and, you know, employees come first and things like that. And, oh, this is my favorite one. And it’s all going to lead to profitable growth. Oh, really? We’re a for profit company and our core value is profitability. What a joke. And having worked so hard on was tough, right? But there wasn’t a lot of guidance out there, at least that we could find on how to really, what does a good set of core values look like? And so I wish this is something I could help people with because there was no process other than we just started looking. We’re like this, 10 core values. They aren’t working. We gotta find a different way. And it just happened to be that we were in a advisory board meeting, and one of the advisors in that meeting, Jeff Hutzel, he just makes this comment. He’s like, you guys find a better way to do stuff. Didn’t think too much about it. And the meeting ends. And that night I woke up, I’m like, oh, my gosh, Jeff just gave us our first core value. We’re trying to find a better way in everything that we’re doing, whether it’s making a bean bag, from our first bean bag, making a shredded foam bean bag, to making, you know, the poles inside of beanbags to create structure and shape, to doing a strategic plan. How are we going about doing the strategic plan to identifying our core values to find a better way how to lead our team, that is us, and find a better way, like, just seemed to really nail it now. I was so excited, I couldn’t sleep. It was just one of those, you know, moments, my head spinning. I’m like, I bet there’s other words we’re using that we’re just not even talking about. It’s just happening. And one of the things we always talked about was having high expectations. I love the way that my business partner George says it. He says, expect the best, screw the rest, right? I love it. Well, and so I wrote down expect the best. And so the next day I came in and I saw Chip. I’m like, chip, what do you think about these two things as our two of our new core values find a better way, Expect the best. And Chip just looks at me and says, and we want to do the right thing. It’s like, yeah, boom. That was it. All of a sudden. It just kind of came in this flurry. But it took nearly two years to finally to finally get there. You know, we knew what, you know, for quite some time, for months up to that point, that what we had wasn’t working, wasn’t working for us. And I don’t think that that type of core value identification works for most companies. So we finally kind of just stumbled, you know, stumbled into it. And we use those three core values today, find a better way, expect the best, and do the right thing. So we are using those core values in everything that we’re doing. And yeah, we still put them on the wall. And yeah, it’s on T shirts, which sometimes I abhor that stuff because it seems so trite, but it’s. Because it’s everywhere. Yeah, it’s on the wall. Yeah, it’s on T shirts. But it’s also the way that people talk about it every day. We talk about it as leaders at every opportunity. And over time, we created a system to identify and reward people that are living our core values. We just started with the Find a Better Way award. And so a lot of companies do these types of award systems, and I don’t think that they always work that great. I think that some companies maybe do them very, very well, but we’ve kept ours very simple. The basic idea is that we wanted to say thanks to someone that’s finding a better way to do something. We don’t care what that something is. You want to paint that wall pink across the room because you feel it’s going to brighten everybody’s day. Make the suggestion. And I did not want this to be the suggestion box company. And I think most people know what I’m talking about. That’s the company that has the little wooden box, and it’s got a slot cut in the top of it, and there’s a lock on the box. And, you know, maybe if someone has the guts, they’ll slide in a suggestion. And if they. They make that suggestion, this is what happens. Three months later, they’re standing at the water cooler with their buddy and. And they’re talking. It’s like, yeah, I told those idiots in management to change that and to improve that. I made that suggestion. Morons. I wanted people to be part of implementing it. You don’t just get to drop the bomb and walk away. So we wanted a culture where people are part of implementing the suggestion, trying new stuff out. And, you know, I kind of hate the fail faster. You know, don’t fear. Like, I just don’t want people to fear failure. I want them to try something new, to find an improvement. And it doesn’t matter if you’re in accounting, if you’re in design, if you’re in engineering, operations, sales, marketing, it doesn’t matter. And they make that, you know, the suggestion and then it goes in front of a panel. That group votes on what’s the best. The best idea and want of the factors in there is implementability. Some of the ideas have already been implemented at that point, some of them have not. But we don’t really care. Like it’s just the spirit of how is everybody thinking how to make, you know, just doesn’t even matter. Big or small improvement. How are we moving forward? That winner gets 2,500 bucks. And we do that four times a year. And then the, the annual winner gets $10,000 and we do it at an all company meeting. And now so we have a real life person with a real life example of how they were finding a better way living our core values. We bring them up on stage, we give them an oversized check and then we take a picture of them. And that picture then goes on the wall of fab for find a better way. And now that picture with the description of what they’ve done continues to live on. So we continue to honor that person and thank them publicly for what they’ve done. And it’s a great way to reinforce the core values.
Matt Alder [00:15:21]:
When you’re recruiting new people into the company, how do you sort of reflect those values? How do you use them to find the right talent and persuade people to come and join you?
Matt Jung [00:15:32]:
Well, I believe that as a leader of a company, an organization, it is your responsibility to always be recruiting right in everything that you’re doing every day, in every way. So it starts there. It’s not just a one time event. Oh, we’re going to recruit somebody in. You got to live it. I mean a growing business needs to have people to help it to be able to grow needs great people. And the way to do that is to let people know what you’re doing. Because I’ve always believed that comfort research is a great place to work. But it is not for everybody, right? We are not a one size fits all. Some people will hate this place. And so we want to find the people that are great fits. And I love the way that our culture concierge says it. Becky Plug, she says, you know, comfort, she’s looking for people that are not just culture fits, but people that are culture ads. And that’s what we’re looking for, people that add to our culture and can thrive in it. And then Becky, she’s the one that I mentioned is our culture concierge. And it’s her job to make sure that we’re continuing to live, honor, and improve the culture every single day. Her hiring process is pretty involved, what she has created over the last several years. So it starts when the job gets posted and the core values are interwoven into that posting. So it doesn’t look like a normal posting. It gives the flavor of who we are as an organization already. And then the questions that she lays out. And we do a lot of team interviews, so we’ll get someone from engineering to sit with someone from sales, someone from design to sit with somebody from accounting. And it’s never the same, right? We mix it up. And so those team interviews, they’re given questions that they’re to ask the recruit. And a lot of companies do that, right? But what she’s really done a great job at, and I think this is the important piece, is these are the types of answers you’re looking for. How are they, you know, answering it? Not just, hey, did you find a better way? And they go up and talk about, like, I mean, it ends up being a bunch of bull, right? So being able to look for genuine answers and have it interwoven into every part of the process.
Matt Alder [00:18:10]:
What’s surprised you the most? Building this business from a.
Matt Jung [00:18:13]:
From a people perspective, the power of culture. That has been one of the most rewarding, unexpectedly rewarding things my entire career. Like, I love building stuff, right? That. That’s where I get, you know, innate enjoyment, whether it’s building a product or building equipment or building a business. Like, business is the greatest, like, engineering product project of all time. I love that. Using core values and identifying with folks that identify, you know, with that. That is a tool that you have in your toolbox that usually gets either misused or ignored. And when you get it right, oh, my gosh, it is the most powerful tool that you have for a growing organization, really, any organization. And when I say organization, I’m not just talking about for profit, business. I’m talking about nonprofits. I’m talking about schools, I’m talking about government, I’m talking about churches. These. When anywhere where there’s a group of people, if they can align to a common set of core values and beliefs, purpose, that’s when you can really make massive changes.
Matt Alder [00:19:32]:
So final question. What’s next? What is the. What does the future hold? What are you. What are you looking forward to?
Matt Jung [00:19:38]:
Well, I’m looking forward to continuing to build this business. It’s the most fun thing that I could ever imagine. One of the things I mentioned earlier is that I don’t know if it’s unique to our area, and I don’t think it is. I think this is common throughout the world. That we had a lot of people approach us and lend a helping hand without any expectation of anything in return. And I did not want to wait until I was retired to start trying to give back to folks who that are on their own entrepreneurial journey. And then this whole culture piece, we started giving tours. Cause it’s a real easy way to share those rules that we’ve got and also share the system that we created around the core values. Because it’s really been working. And over the last two years, I’ve given probably 100 of these things where we just invite 30 people or so to come on in. We do a little workshop at the end and we talk about their core values. And I give them what a good set of core values looks like. We talk about the system of reinforcing those core values. And I realized it’s like, shoot, this is a really hard way to do it, bringing people in and preparing for these tours. I’m going to write a book. I’m going to put all of this in book form. I’m in the process of writing that and because I want to share this with more people, because I so have seen how firsthand culture and core values, when done properly, is the most powerful tool in your toolbox. And I want to share that with others because I think that we weren’t the only one that struggled with culture and core values. And when it’s done right, you can move mountains.
Matt Alder [00:21:32]:
Matt, thank you very much for talking to me.
Matt Jung [00:21:34]:
My pleasure. Thank you, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:21:36]:
My thanks to Matt Jung. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for recruiting future. If you’re a Spotify or Pandora user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
