Scaling Trust: How the Right Leadership Team Drives Sustainable Growth with Andy White at Closinglock

In this episode, I sit down with Andy White, co-founder of Closinglock (ranked No. 135 on the 2025 Inc. 5000), to talk about what it really means to "scale trust" as your company grows. Andy shares how trust isn't just a feel-good concept; it's a key driver of performance, stronger culture, and deeper employee engagement, and we explore how giving teams real autonomy paired with transparent communication can unlock better results. He also offers a fresh perspective on hiring, explaining why he prioritizes character over experience, and highlights the continued importance of in-person interactions for building genuine connections. We wrap up by discussing how openly sharing business challenges with your team can actually bring people closer together and spark more creative, effective solutions. Episode Highlights & Time Stamps 3:26 Closing Lock Overview 6:49 The Future of Real Estate Transactions 7:37 Scaling Trust in Business 11:28 Hiring for Trust and Growth 13:33 Macro Management Style 15:06 Building a Trusting Culture 16:27 Qualities of a Great Hire 19:17 Assessing Learning Mentality 20:38 Strategies for Scaling Trust 23:16 The Role of Transparency 27:58 Concluding Thoughts on Trust About Andy White Founder and CEO of Closinglock, a fast-growing technology company focused on protecting money in real estate transactions. With a background in engineering and a PhD in computer engineering, Andy brings a deep technical perspective to solving one of the industry's most critical challenges: fraud in money movement. Under his leadership, Closinglock has earned a spot on the Inc. 5000 list, reflecting its rapid growth and strong market impact. Andy is known for his focus on building a high-trust, high-performance culture, where transparency, autonomy, and continuous learning are at the core. He believes in hiring for character over experience and empowering teams to take ownership, scale themselves, and drive meaningful impact across the organization. Passionate about innovation and leadership, Andy is committed to modernizing the real estate transaction process while fostering a culture where people and performance grow together. How to Connect with Andy White: LinkedIn: Andy White https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-closinglock/ Company Website: Closinglock https://www.closinglock.com Get In Touch with Andy: https://www.closinglock.com/contact/ Resources & Next Steps Ready to take your leadership energy to the next level? Explore free training and resources at https://training.coreelevation.com/ to help you identify energy leaks, strengthen your leadership presence, and elevate your team's performance. 🌐 Explore More: training.coreelevation.com 🎧 Listen to the Full Episode: Growth Think Tank Podcast

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What type of manager are you? What's the culture? How do I fit in here? How do I succeed here? And I usually tell people I'm a macro manager. So I'm the opposite of micro. And what I've kind of discovered over time is most people, especially great people, but most people want to have an impact with what they do. That's typically why you stay at a job and love a job. It's because you have an impact and what you do actually matters. I mean, there's obviously the financial component. We all have to pay our mortgages and things like that. But there's, do you feel good about what you do on a daily basis? Do you want to show up to that job? Do you care about your team? Do you want to help out that team? And when you do, when you start having that impact, that's when you

• 0:43Speaker 00

  can really start seeing this incredible growth and it compounds on itself. Like you end up getting other people that want to have an impact. And then you have a whole team full of people.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Welcome to Growth Think Tank. This is the one and only place where you will get insight from the founders and the CEOs of the fastest growing privately held companies. I am the host. My name is Gene Havitt. I help leaders and their teams navigate the defining moments of their growth. Are you ready to grow? Today, we're going to talk about scaling trust. What is the level of trust you have across your culture? It's probably not something you've thought about very much. Hopefully, you don't have distrust going on that is causing you stress and strife. But what can you learn from today's episode that will help you improve trust across this? I think you'll find some very tactical things. Our special guest today is the co-founder of

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Closing Lock. They really specialize in protecting money and real estate transactions, and they do it in a kind of unique way. So if you're curious about that, go check them out. But they've made the Inc. list a couple of times and really surprising growth rates for a company this size. We meet with Andy White about scaling trust.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  And scaling trust is something that you want to think about how, what level of trust you want to have in your company. And today, we talk about some of the things in there, how transparency plays a role in that, and how some of the other things that you can do really create the kind of trust in your business that you want that drive results. My name is Gene Hemmott. I am an executive coach. I help companies that are in growth mode really create the business of their dreams and to do it without burning out. Now, I can say so much more about how we do that. But if you were curious about the work that we do, I'd love to invite you to a free training that we have. We host these

• 2:43Speaker 01

  every once in a while. You can sign up for the next one. It's live in person. It's usually very intimate. You can get your questions answered. You might even get a little bit of coaching from me. I've been doing this for over a decade and would love to get to know you and your business and really give you some insight around that. I can't tell you exactly when the next one will be, but if you go to training.coreelevation.com, you can sign up for free today and it will help you become a better leader and help you scale your business and all without burnout. So go to training.coreelevation.com and sign up now. Now, here's the interview with Andy. Hi, Andy. How are you?

• 3:19Speaker 00

  I'm doing great, Gene. How are you?

• 3:21Speaker 01

  I am fantastic. We're going to have a great conversation about scaling trust. Before we dive into this, I'd love to know more about your company. Tell me about Closing Lock.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I appreciate you having me on. Closing Lock, we protect money for real estate transactions. So as you're familiar with, there's a lot of fraud out there in the world, particularly on the real estate side. People buy, sell their homes, lose their life savings. So we partner with title companies to work with their buyers, sellers, agents, et cetera, to make sure all the money is moving to the right spot for the real estate transaction.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Well, I'd love to ask a follow-up question on this. Like, this is, you know, I've got a lot of real estate properties myself. We get some rental portfolios and things like this. Where's the future of this industry going? Because things are, I thought blockchain would be peeking in and that, you know, a lot of smart contracts are being used, but I just don't see that. And maybe I'm just not part of the industry. Where are things going over the next three years?

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a great question. The industry itself has been around forever, right? We've been buying and selling property since the beginning of mankind practically. So that's not exactly a new thing. The, all the technological advances, one of the things I talk about, moving money in real estate, you know, there are kind of three different ways we communicate for a real estate transaction, email, phone, and fax. And then there are two ways we move money for a real estate transaction. It's check and a wire. And that's it. And out of those five different things I just described, the newest system I said was actually out in the early 1980s. So the Fedwire system is kind of the newest out of that list of things I just talked about. And that was in the early 1980s.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  So this industry is ready and prepared for some technological improvements in the way we actually send money for these transactions, which is one of the reasons I started Closing Lock. When I bought my house in 2016, fast forward a little bit, I heard about a spoofed email, somebody almost lost all their money in a fraudulent wire transfer scheme. And I thought, man, how did we do that? And I realized, gosh, I had driven to the bank, I had gotten an account number out of an email and wired off our life savings through Wells Fargo. By dumb luck, did it actually go to the right spot. And that was a big lightbulb moment for me. My background's engineering. I've got a PhD in computer engineering. I'm not exactly a cyber dummy when it comes to this stuff. And I was shocked at how easily I could have lost my life savings in that transaction,

• 5:44Speaker 00

  and how my wife would have killed me had that happened. And so she was the one who actually told me about the spoofed email problem. And I also just remember thinking at that time, which, you know, that was nine years ago now, of why do I have to go send a wire transfer? Why can't I just like link my bank account? And, you know, somebody figures out how to make this money move and this transaction is Complete at that point. So that's what set me on the journey with Closing Lock and that's what we started doing. So I think the future, you know, I, I don't want to put a timeframe on it. I know you asked next three years, but I think the industry has in the short period I've been in it these last nine years. I've seen a pretty big shift from, okay, let's email everything to, okay, that's probably not sufficient.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  Just emailing and having everybody just come into the office and sign everything and then sending us a wire transfer or a cashier's check. That's starting to shift more toward the digital revolution that that a lot of industries have experienced over the last couple of decades. So I, I think we'll just see more automation, faster closing, easier way to make payments, easier way to close on those transactions.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Fantastic. And I appreciate you guys making it safer as well.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, thank you.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Well, let's dive into this, you know, one of the things that it's, it's rare because it's a math problem. But you guys made the ink list twice and you actually climbed up there, not by much, but you went from 139 in 2024. Do I have this right?

• 7:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  And then to 135 in 2025. It's a three-year growth rate for those listening in. It's based on revenues. It's not profitability, but it's a very good signal that you're doing the right thing over time. So you guys were able to, to actually climb up the charts, which is not easy to do. You got about 100 employees plus, and you got there because of, of your trust and the culture that you build around this. Tell us a little bit about what you described as scaling trust.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, uh, you know, the, it's a bit like flying the plane while you're building it. And you're exactly right. The, the law of big numbers here makes it harder to move up the list. I was actually very surprised we moved up the list. I think we, we somewhat benefited from the fact that the rest of the economy has not done great over some of those periods of time. So some of the growth kind of slowed for others and we kept accelerating, you know, I'll say that, but I'll also take credit. We sell into the real estate industry and we're a consumption based model. So we only get paid when a real estate transaction happens. Not a big surprise. The real estate market has like plummeted since 2022 when interest rates started climbing there. So we've been fortunate to, to still grow really strongly amidst that difficult kind of background or that climate that we've been in.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  But it's, you know, it's like flying the plane while you're building it. People always talk about that. I wish I had kind of all the right answers there. I, I talked early on, one of the things I did from the very beginning that I am, I am proud of with Weston, he was the first employee that joined me in, in 2021. He and I talked a lot about finding someone to do your job. And so we, you know, we, a lot of people say, focus on the most critical tasks, write down the most critical things. Those things are important. You don't want to waste time. You want to spend time on the most important things you can. But at the same time, like their dishes in the sink, somebody's got to put them in the dishwasher. And, you know, if that's me today, that's fine. Like, let me put those dishes in the sink, and then let me find somebody who can take over that

• 9:02Speaker 00

  job or that task from me. And same thing with Weston. I was like, great, let's scale the sales team together. What are you doing today? How do we hire somebody that's doing what you're doing? And we will find more valuable work for you to do, kind of going forward. And, you know, that, that takes a special type of personality to say, you know what, and a certain level of trust to be able to say, I'm going to give away my job. Most people hold on to their jobs. It's like, you know, I, I built this silo, I own this thing. It's my, my job security. I won't get fired as long as I'm in control or ownership of this thing. It takes, you know, special type of personality, super low ego, obviously, that says, I don't care who gets credit for this. I'm going to find somebody else that can take this over. And then I'll go find something, you know, positive, valuable that

• 9:45Speaker 00

  I can do for the company instead of what I'm doing here. And that is actually, you talk about scaling trust, that, that's the only way it scales. You find somebody else to do your job, then you go find something else, and then you find somebody to do that job, and then you find something else, and rinse and repeat that. And, you know, over time, it starts working.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  You probably wouldn't be surprised if I said, a lot of leaders, CEOs, have a big problem with hiring people that aren't willing to develop the younger group of people. The, the junior staff, if you will, underneath them, they want to hold on to it because they're good at it, or because they want to make sure it's done the right way, which is respectable. But also, if they're not growing those people, it doesn't really create the kind of flywheel that we want as a company. And so how were you able to like convince your employees to, to do this? Like, let go of what they're currently doing to develop others, so that they can move into a, a bigger area?

• 10:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a, I wish there was a silver bullet that was obvious as to how that that actually works. I mean, obviously, we're talking about trust and you have to have that trust relationship. One of the things Weston trusted me with early on, which I really appreciated was if he went and found something else to do, if he if he hired his replacement and found something else that I wasn't going to say, great, we don't need Weston anymore. In fact, to me, that made him even more valuable. Like, oh, my gosh, this guy can actually scale our business. Like, he can build a scalable organization. And so I just love people with that mentality that, you know, we talk a lot about kind of over indexing on personality, like finding people with the grittiness, the positive

• 11:23Speaker 00

  attitude. And in fact, I I focused on that, especially early on, more so than experience. Like, you know what? You haven't been in this industry? No big deal. You haven't done X, you haven't done Y, and I'm going to need you to do X and Y. But no big deal. I like your grit. I like your positive attitude. I like that you're willing to take a chance. You like some risk. You're okay with change. Change scares a lot of people. You've got a good energy to you. Hiring for those people and bringing those leaders in, it creates kind of a flywheel effect because you all feed off of each other. And, you know, we work in person five days a week, which is a bit unusual. I realize that's not the standard in today's environment. We didn't intend to start out that way. We just kind of did, and it worked well. And it's like, well, we're growing well.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  Things are going well. Like, why fix it if it ain't broke type attitude? And we just kept doing it from there. But anyways, I've rambled, so I'll pause there and make sure I'm still on track for the questions you're interested in asking.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  No, I think you're on the right track with this. You know, you were talking about how Weston was more valuable to the company because he was willing to let go of whatever domain of expertise he had and transfer that to someone else so that he could work on the next thing. Like, I'm sure you're seeing this at scale. It's not just Westing doing this.

• 12:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And that's what creates the scalable organization. So you're talking earlier about some CEOs have a hard time letting go. And that's, I think that's everybody, not just CEOs. Like, you know, it's, if you're an expert at something, it's hard to say, okay, I'm not going to do that anymore. But at the same time, you've got to look at the bigger picture. Can you really run a hundred person company, a thousand person company, a million person company? If you're the one who's doing all of something, the answer is obviously no. And as you scale, that becomes more and more obvious. When there are five of you, sure, you can own your thing, and you can do all of it, and you can be the hero. And, you know, some people, that's what that matters to them. If they want to be the hero, they want to be the, get all the credit for it, or whatever, you know, makes them tick, that's fine. And just kind of know what your lane

• 13:25Speaker 00

  is, though. If that's you, just realize, like, you're probably not going to be a hundred person company one day, or not, not super successful, because that's going to be hard to do. You've got to have those scalable systems. And trust is a two-way street, right? We're talking about, you know, I was hoping Weston would, would scale out of his position and scale into something else, and then we'd find something else for him to do. And he kept doing that, which is great. But he had to trust me, that I wasn't going to then cut him, once he, you know, found his backfill. And I had to trust him, that he wasn't going to be playing hero ball over there, and he wasn't going to be micromanaging everything. One of the, in fact, one of the words I use a lot, when we talk about kind of scaling, or leadership, or something like that, is being

• 14:05Speaker 00

  a macro manager. So, a lot of people, particularly when, when I hire a new senior leader, what type of manager are you? What's the culture? How do I fit in here? How do I succeed here? And I usually tell people, I'm a macro manager. So I'm the opposite of micro. And what I've kind of discovered over time is, most people, especially great people, but most people want to have an impact with what they do. That's, that's typically why you stay at a job and love a job. It's because you have an impact, and what you do actually matters. I mean, there's, there's obviously the financial component. We, we all have to pay our mortgages and things like that. But there's, do you feel good about what you do on a daily basis? Do you want to show up to that

• 14:47Speaker 00

  job? Do you care about your team? Do you want to help out that team? And when you do- When you start having that impact, that's when you can really start seeing this incredible growth and it compounds on itself. Like you, you end up getting other people that want to have an impact. And then you have a whole team full of people. And then the problem is actually I've got a hundred people that all want to have an outsized impact. How do I make sure everybody is being able to contribute in the ways that they want. But that macro management style is basically just saying, hey, here's, here's what we expect. Here's what we need. Go do it. If you have problems, let me know. Like we'll all be happy to jump in and help out, but I'm going to get out of your way and let you go figure this out. And, you know, tell me what you need to succeed. And I usually tell a lot of the senior leadership and, you know, as, as you

• 15:30Speaker 00

  grow and you've seen this as well, you, you end up hiring and, and having functions that you're not the functional expert for, right? Like I was an engineer, so I coded the, the platform to begin with, and I, I knew how to do that. And, uh, you know, I was our, our principal engineer here. But over time, we hired other engineers and now it's to a point where they've added so much stuff and it's so much better and more scalable than what I ever built. And these guys are incredible. Like, and they, you know, they've built a scalable system. I, I got it started. And it's like that across the board. I mean, we've got VP of Marketing. She's fantastic. She knows a lot about marketing. I know nothing about marketing. So I can't show up and say, here's what we should be doing. All I can say is like, do you need money? Do you need people? Do you need new products? Like, tell me what you need and then we'll figure out how to go get it for you.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Well, I love where we're going with this interview, Andy, and I appreciate it. Uh, I want to go backwards a little bit because you mentioned something, but I, sometimes we have to put a spotlight on some things that are very powerful and different than others. You had talked about basically the personal qualities of a good hire. And you said, I'm not as concerned about experience in the industry. I think that's, that's one of the checkboxes. A lot of it goes, you must have three to five years' experience. And, and we all get it. But you also have skill fit and things like that, but you seem like you're over indexing on, on the culture fit of what you're doing, the grit, the, you know, this, this ability to develop others and let go of things. Um, did you learn that somewhere or did you just

• 17:00Speaker 01

  decide that you wanted to have this in your company?

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I mostly decided I wanted to have it in our company. The, the luxury I have too, is there aren't a lot of tech companies that sell to title and escrow companies that exist out there. So finding somebody with those experienced, uh, skill sets is probably unlikely to begin with. So I have that luxury. So it's easy to say, okay, I don't need to over index for experience. But at the same time, I mean, even just like different journeys and even if it's not the same industry, just that same skill set. I do index more so because I'm a big believer in learning. I mean, we, we talked about, uh, your book earlier. Love to learn from that. I'm, I'm excited to go read it and learn something from it because we all need to have that kind of growth mindset, that learning mentality. And if you do, and you, you find other great leaders that have that same learning mentality, they want to

• 17:44Speaker 00

  learn everything they can. Uh, they want to work hard. They want to have an impact. You can almost put them on anything and they will be successful at it. Yeah, there might be some ramping time and it might be, you know, a little bumpy at first or something like that. But in general, like you find great people that fit all those characteristics we just talked about, and they're excited and willing and want to learn and grow. Like it, it's not hard for them to succeed, kind of doing whatever, whatever's needed.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  I want to ask you a question and you may not want to answer this, which would be perfectly fun. But you may have some, some A players listening into this in the future going, I want to see who Andy is and who this company is, and I'm going to listen to the podcast. So again, if you don't want to answer it, I get it. But how do you assess whether someone has that learning mentality?

• 18:32Speaker 00

  Good question. Uh, one of the, the things Weston taught me early on, when, when he started working with me was, um, just ask somebody, what, what's something you've taught yourself recently? What's something you've learned recently and, and not work related? Like just what's something in life you have done that is interesting? Uh, you know, you asked me, what's something you learned that's, that's interesting and unusual? I learned to juggle when I was little. Why? I don't know. Just for fun, learned how to juggle and that was something I picked up and still know how to do this day. But if you can usually tell pretty quickly how intellectually curious somebody is just by talking to them. I mean, you can also tell, how many questions do they ask in the interview? You know, you do an interview and you ask them a bunch of questions and you get to the end of it and you say, what do you want to know about closing lock? What do you want to know about the team? They're like, I read your website. I feel pretty good about everything.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  That's pretty tough. I mean, there are cases where that can be okay. But in general, I tell everybody employment's a two-way street. You know, I got to make sure I like you, but you got to make sure you like me and you got to like the company and you got to understand what you're walking into. Because the worst thing we can do is be like, great, here's the job. And it's something completely different than what you expect. And then six months later, you're like, hey, you lied to me about what I'd be doing here. I'm out, I'm going to somewhere else. And then you're starting back over looking for more people to fill those positions. So I'm pretty big on like, hey, two-way street here, ask any questions. And you know, some of the best interviews I've had, and I guess I am sharing the secrets here. So if you're listening, don't, don't use my, my tactics against me here in the future interview.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  But one of the things I've, I've found is when people ask questions about like the business model, the industry, where's the industry going the next three years? You know, why are you excited about this? How were sales last quarter? What does the board look like? But you know, people start asking like pretty specific business questions. That generally means they're curious beyond just whatever their functional area is. So you know, if you're the VP of engineering coming in for an interview and you're asking me about like, hey, how was net dollar retention? And why do you care about that? And what can you do to influence that? What could I do to influence that? Those are like pretty good signals that that person's gonna be willing to learn and adapt and wants to know how things are going.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Well, I appreciate you sharing that with us. We're talking about scaling trust. What has, what have we left out of scaling trust that would help other CEOs kind of understand what you have done to make your team perform at the level they've performed at?

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Sorry, I cut out there just for a second. Can you repeat the question?

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  Sorry about that.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  What have you done to? What have we left out of this conversation around scaling trust that would help other CEOs?

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, good question. I think we do some things a little bit differently. I mentioned kind of working in person. I'm a big believer in that. Actually, I think it's a lot easier to build trust in person than it is remotely or via Zoom or via phone call, etc. In fact, I learned that early days trying to sell our product. We're trying to protect money movement and real estate transactions. You can imagine, it was just my wife and I, we started it. We're going to title companies saying, hey, sign up for our platform. We're going to protect the hundreds of thousands of dollars you're moving on every real estate transaction. Please do it through our software instead of the way you normally do it. And P.S., we've never done this before. P.S., we're brand new to this industry and we kind of have no background in business doing this. Is it cool if we protect that transaction

• 21:52Speaker 00

  for you? That's a pretty tough trust hurdle to get over. And so what we did from the very beginning was we showed up at the conferences, we showed up in person with lunches, like, hey, let me bribe you with a lunch to just listen to me for 30 minutes, talk about why our software is going to be beneficial for your title company. People are nice. They'll be like, yeah, sure. If you want to waste your time bringing me lunch, I'll do it. And eventually, we got some people on board and started using the platform and were able to scale it from there. So I think, you know, in person, as much as you may love it or hate it, I do think that is valuable for creating trust. Even just think about, I have interactions on a daily basis with people in the break room when I go to get water or whatever, that I would never meet otherwise. Like, 100 people, it's hard to meet everybody

• 22:35Speaker 00

  in the business on a daily basis. And, you know, you get to have those interactions that you wouldn't normally have. So then when we do have to have a tough conversation in the future, or like something bad happens in the business, you know, businesses are not always up into the right, as much as the Inc. 5000 shows, you know, us climbing up into the right. There are things that happen internally that are challenging along the way. When you work in person, it's really easy to get each other together and say, great, let's just talk about this. What questions do you have? I guess, to further that point, talking about Q and A, or what questions you might have, the, we also have a bit of extreme transparency. I usually say what I think. I don't try to hide what I'm thinking about anything. I, that might be a little bit unusual relative to some other leaders

• 23:20Speaker 00

  out there. But I found, you know, it really helps with aligning people because I'm not trying to worry about What I've told one group, what I haven't told some other group, I just kind of share whatever I'm thinking broadly with everybody. And that makes it really easily on, on easy on my side to make sure, you know, I'm being consistent. I'm talking about things from a consistent standpoint with everybody. And it also ends up being a whole lot more efficient and easier than, you know, if we're, I don't want to say sugar coating because that gives the impression that I, you know, deliver things in a rude manner or something like that. But I'll give a quick example real fast.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  It, we were in a recent roadmap meeting and one of the items on there, and I just kind of blurted out, oh, I really dislike doing X. The team laughed and said, well, tell us how you really feel, you know, like, uh, you know, where's this coming from? And then we were able to have the conversation, okay, here's what I think about it. Here's why I think that about it. And I'm not saying we, we shouldn't do it, but we're able to have that immediate feedback and conversation about it. And the employees trust me like if we go build X, you know, no one's going to get fired over that. That if they believe that X is the right thing to build, then by all means, let's go build it. And I can be supportive of that. But by me being able to just easily say and be transparent of here's what I think about it.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  We're able to cut out like, you know, the pre meetings before the meetings, the post meetings, after the meetings, talking to the manager, getting them to talk to the people about what's going on there. You know, there's no like wasted time. There's no kind of blame game or anything like that. It's just like, well, here's what I think about it. Okay, here's what you think about it. And of course we do it in a respectful manner so that we, you know, make sure we've got a friendly and respectful culture here.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  I want to share this with you and the audience as well, because you're not, you know, you haven't been there for all 800 of our founder CEOs through the podcast.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  We look at a lot of the, the, the real driving factors of this and transparency shows up. One of the most common words. We actually have analyzed this across a lot of the interviews we've had. And the, the number of CEOs and founders that will come back and say, we could, we wouldn't be the company we are if we didn't have the level of transparency we do. And so I talked about it on stages. So just reinforcing the fact that you, you know, it's probably natural to you, but it's, it's not natural to others. And they really, you know, try to keep people in boxes and keep, keep the data. Maybe, maybe it's profitability. There, there, you know, some things they don't want to share. I get it. But the best performing

• 25:54Speaker 01

  organizations will have a level of transparency that's probably remarkable versus one that's like, you know, kind of like we, we give you out the information we think you need.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. You know what? I, I, I'd like to say I was some super genius and figured that out on my own. I just kind of stumbled into it early on when we started hiring people and we, we were going through fundraising. I was trying to raise a series seed round. And we, well, actually we did a friends and family round. Then we did the seed round. We were having all hands, but there were only like, you know, eight of us and then 15 of us and that kind of stuff. And I realized at these all hands, I, I started showing the P and L because I actually had a question early on at an all hands of like, hey, great. We just raised some more money. Can we get raises? And I thought, oh, this is interesting. They have a different view of the business than I have of the, of the business because the reality at the time was we were burning a hundred thousand dollars a month or something like that. Like not a whole lot of money to go around for raises. And I started showing the P and L at the all hands. I still

• 26:48Speaker 00

  do that at, at the monthly all hands that we have. And I say, here's how much money we brought in. Here's how much money we spent. Here's the delta there. Here's how much money we have in the bank account. And what I found is, you know, that, that, that, that actually develops trust. Like people start, okay, like here's, I understand where the business is. I understand what's going on. I understand we have runway, so I don't need to be worried about my job. You can kind of answer a lot of those questions that don't even kind of come up from the beginning. People would be too scared to ask like, what's our runway? Nobody's going to raise their, their hand and ask that in all hands. They're like, you know, are we all going to go out of business? Or how much money are we making? How much money are we losing? But I found that if you just share that information, there's, there's very little harm in sharing it. My original thought was,

• 27:30Speaker 00

  okay, like, you know, certain people need to know certain things. And there, there are private things like, I don't tell everybody, everybody's salary. If you want to go tell your salary to somebody else, feel free, but I'm not going to share that information on your behalf. But anything business related or company Related, I'm, you know, happy to share what's going on there. And then that gets everybody bought into, we are on the same team. We all understand where we are. Like, we know where we stand as a business. We know where we're going. And we're all in this boat together. Let's figure it out. Because like I said, it's not always easy the whole time. So, it's good if everybody kind of has the same level of understanding about what's going on that you do.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  Well, we're wrapping up here, Andy. I will leave this with two things that are, I feel like are universal truths. If you tell people the bad news, that they will typically rally for you, not against you, like they won't, you know, exit the company. They will try to think of new ideas to save money or new ideas to, to make something work. And the second piece behind this is if you don't tell them, usually they make up the worst story. They get scared. It's a fear thing that people make up. So, all that being said, those listening in, really appreciate Andy, you being here to talk about scaling trust and the impact that it's made at Closing Lot.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  Thanks so much, Gene. It was a pleasure.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Another fantastic episode here on the podcast. Scaling trust is something you definitely want to think about as your culture begins to grow. Doesn't matter. You can't do it too early, I don't think. But if you really are having some people issues in your business, you might want to look at the level of trust that's going on and what you're doing to either make that better, or what are some of the things that are actually getting in the way of how you show up as a leader? And those blind spots are really important to be able to understand. I mentioned this earlier, if you want to get the latest free training we have, so that you can be a better leader and grow your business, go to training.coreelevation.com and schedule for the next one. It's absolutely free. When you think of growth, then you think of leadership, think of growth thinking.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  As always, with the courage, we'll see you next time.