Brad Johnson: Welcome back to another episode of Do Business. Do Life. I have Glenn Street here with us today. Welcome to the show, Glenn.
Glenn Street: Brad, it’s so good to see you. It’s been a while, and it’s a lot less exotic than the last time.
Brad Johnson: It is much less exotic. I can say you’re on a very short list of people that I met in Kenya, Africa. So, our mutual friend Stu and Amy McLaren, I know they do a really cool trip a couple of times a year, both of us, you and your wife, Peggy, my wife, Sarah, and our children were all on that trip. And that was your second time over there, right?
Glenn Street: It was our second time. And we just absolutely love it. And the main reason we go is because of the amazing people that are there. We’re all like-minded, very successful in their businesses, and have their hearts in the right place because they’re all major donors of Village Impact, which is a phenomenal organization, as we know.
Brad Johnson: It really is. And that was my first trip and our family’s first trip to Africa. And I can say how we were greeted when we showed up to that first village. I’ve never experienced anything like that before in my life. I felt like I was Taylor Swift. I mean, we were swarmed and just the most open, loving, gracious people. And they were a big fan of my daughter, Nelly. I know you saw that. They were surrounding her, but yeah, it was quite the experience and definitely a life changer. And then we went on a safari too, and that was cool. That was pretty amazing.
Glenn Street: Yes.
Brad Johnson: Well, so as we were sitting around a campfire one night, and as happens on trips like this, you’re like, “Hey, well, where are you from? Okay. What do you do?” You hit me with, I think, probably one of the most unique businesses that I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve been in business a while now, but I would love to hear how does one get in the business. What was the origin story of how Glenn and Mascots.com became the place that pro sports teams go to, to create mascots?
Glenn Street: Well, here in Calgary, we have a major festival called the Calgary Stampede. It’s probably Canada’s most iconic festival, biggest music festival, one of the biggest rodeos in the world. And I became Founding Chair of that mascot committee. And at the same time, a buddy of mine had gone to the Calgary Flames and pitched an idea to them, and they said yes. And he got it going, but he traveled a lot in his job, and he realized he needed help. So, he came to me and he said, “I need help. Will you help me?” And I said, “Sure.” And so, we became partners and we owned and we were running what turned out to be the very first mascot in the National Hockey League, and one of the first mascots in professional sports, a character named Harvey the Hound.
All people have to do is put in Harvey the Hound, Craig MacTavish, Edmonton. There’s a video that goes viral of the… There’s a huge rivalry between Calgary and Edmonton. And the Edmonton coach reached up and tore the tongue out of the Calgary mascot, which was a ton of fun. But anyway, we’re running this character, and teams had come and play the Flames. And a couple of days later, I’d always get a phone call, “Hey, that’s a great idea. Can you do one for us?” And the response was always, “Ah, nah. You know what? We’re just doing this for fun. It’s a lark. You can’t buy tickets to Flames games. It’s our only way in.” But the calls kept coming and coming and coming.
So, in ‘87, we opened our doors. ‘89 I bought my partner out. And fast forward to today, we’ve worked with about half the characters in the NFL, NHL, and Major League Baseball. We’ve done a whole ton of colleges. The only continent we don’t have a client on is Antarctica. And because 95% of what we do is export. We’ve just crossed the quarter-billion-dollar line of economic impact for our city. So, it’s this fun little story that nobody in Calgary knows we exist. We’re based in Calgary, but everybody in sports in the United States knows who we are.
Brad Johnson: So, let’s go back to that original mascot, and I want to piece this together. So, you already had a business that was creating characters for a festival, and then the Calgary Flames were like, “Hey, we want a character, a mascot. Can you do that for us, too?” And that was the jump into pro sports.
Glenn Street: Well, what happened was that the Calgary Stampede had just gotten a new character. They had one that somebody made in their basement, and it was so heavy, it actually put a strapping 17-year-old farm kid into the hospital. So, they decided they needed a new costume. So, they dealt with a company out of Los Angeles who did movies and things like this. And they created this character, a character named Harry the Horse. And I remember when the costume first came to Calgary, it was my committee responsible for it, which did a number of things to promote the Calgary Stampede. And I remember being in a boardroom with this pile of foam and fur and everybody going, “Now what?” And I put my hand up. I said, “I think I can run this.” So, I formed the committee, I put it together, and I was performing as the mascot from time to time.
Brad Johnson: Oh, you literally were the guy in the mascot.
Glenn Street: I was the guy in the mascot. And because I had that experience, my buddy came and said, “I need help. You already know what’s going on. You’re doing it with the Stampede. Let’s be partners and let’s work together on this.” And so, that’s what we did.
Brad Johnson: And so, was your company at that time, was it kind of a marketing company that the Calgary Stampede supports?
Glenn Street: I was in commercial real estate, actually. Calgary has a very large downtown for the size of the city. And that’s because the Canadian energy industry is based here. So, for example, in the 1970s, one of the Superman movies was filmed in downtown Calgary because it had this large city downtown Manhattan look to it. So, I was leasing an office space downtown. And then I was doing my Stampede thing just as a volunteer. And then my buddy came along and said, “Hey, can you help me here?” And I said, “Sure.” And then it just kind of went from there. As I said, we started getting calls, and we were finally getting so many that we couldn’t ignore them because people would say, “Well, where can we go to get our own costume?”
And we said, “Well, we had to hire a seamstress locally.” And under our direction, she made the mascot because nobody else out there knows what they’re doing. And some of the costumes being made are people in their basements and their garages, mainly, and the stuff that they’re putting out is dangerous. And we had very specific requirements that we needed. And so, at that time, costumes were being made out of furniture upholstery foam, which is the worst thing you can make a costume out of because it absorbs the performer’s sweat and perspiration, but you can’t wash it because we’ve all left the wet sponge under the sink, and it just goes kind of rots over time. And we found a new foam that we used in our characters that is now an industry standard.
And so, the background is that we brought in a seamstress who was the third partner when we decided to actually go forward and start the business. And I was the one that had to be convinced that this was going to be viable. I was still like, “You know, I’m not sure.” The first few years were lean. We’re like any startup. We were horribly undercapitalized. I think we started with a $3,000 line of credit, but over time, we were able to build it to where we are today.
Brad Johnson: Okay. So, going back and being a sports fan my whole life, grew up playing. I played college football, so I’ve seen a few mascots in my day. Looking at your website, just listing a few for those watching and listening in, the Arizona Cardinals, the Cleveland Browns, the Pittsburgh Pirates, the LA Kings, the Chicago Blackhawks, Texas Rangers, and then you’ve gotten into some corporate mascots too. So, I saw A&W on there. I saw Plants and Zombies like the iPhone video game. You’ve done some characters for them. So, if we go back, I think 1984 was when you guys did the Calgary Flames, right? That was the first one?
Glenn Street: Right. Yeah.
Brad Johnson: So, I feel like you hit this inflection point of pro sports where they were trying to create this experience, this characterization of the brand or the team. And it seems like you kind of fell into that by accident, right out of the gates. But then once you saw the demand, you turned it into a business. What were the early learnings? You said it was lean, but as you’re starting to get into these meetings, I’m assuming there are people with a lot of money that are owning sports teams, kind of saying, “This is what we want.” There’s a lot of that that applies to finance too, because a lot of the advisors listening, they’re building their brand, they’re building their image, they want to put out to the world. So, what were some of those early learnings?
Glenn Street: Sure. So, I agree with you. Our timing was right. Probably 10 years earlier, the first entertainment mascot came online, and that was the San Diego Chicken. And up until then, teams like the Mets have their mascot, Mr. Met, since the 1930s, but they weren’t part of the fan experience. And it was the San Diego Chicken, or the famous chicken, that kind of changed that whole dynamic. I mean, they unveiled him by him hatching out of an egg on the field. And so, teams were starting to notice him, starting to see that he was drawing… People were coming just to watch that mascot because he was an entertainer. So, our timing definitely had something to do with it.
When we decided to open our doors, there was a company that was doing singing telegrams and having Cupids show up at your door. And they’d made a few costumes for themselves. And they had started doing some work for some corporate clients. And we knew when we started up that if we tried to go head-to-head with them, we would lose badly because they were much bigger than us. They had the weight. They had the scale. They could crush us. And so, we knew what our strengths were and our advantage was, and that was sports teams because sports-oriented mascots, well, my best example is our first major contract with a major league team in the US was with the Los Angeles Kings.
And after I delivered the character to them, I said, “You’ve got Disney and Universal Studios and Hollywood all on your doorstep. Why did you hire this little company out of Canada to make your mascot?” And they said, “Glenn, when we talked to you and you told us about what was needed to make the character work, we realized it was very different putting somebody in a costume and having them run up and down stairs for maybe two, three hours. That was way more demanding and had a much tighter criteria than a character in a theme park that comes out and gets its picture taken for 20 minutes.” And so, we really played to that angle that, hey, we’re the experts. We were already running a professional sports team program.
So, if people hired anybody else, all they could do is give them the costume, probably give them a crappy one. We could give them the whole package, “Look, and we did this with the Kings. We’re going to design your character. We’re going to build it. I’m going to come down with the costume. We’re going to run auditions. I’m going to train the guy inside, and we’re going to make sure that you are off to a good start.” So, that was something that only we could offer. Nobody else could offer that. And so, that was our strategic advantage when we started. And we are still known as the guys in sports. But the thing is by having that niche that we’re in doesn’t stop us from doing work with other organizations. We still do a lot of corporate work, a lot of work for charities, for cities. And for them, it’s credibility by association.
If we are good enough for the LA Kings or whoever, then we’re good enough for them. And so, I’m a big believer. You pick your niche, and you can’t be all things to all people. So, you pick your niche and you go deep and you fight hard, and you make sure you differentiate yourself within that niche.
Brad Johnson: That’s such an interesting business lesson because, I mean, you kind of accidentally fell into the professional sports at first, but then that domino effect of like, “Hey, how do we get that?” And that’s obviously a very small network that’s hard to break into, but you broke into it, then you took advantage of it, right? And I think the other thing that I heard you say there, Glenn, that’s interesting, you figured out what are the specific needs that are different in this one compared to if I’m a Disney character, I’m assuming you had to make the costume so that you could perform inside of them, move around a lot. The auditions, how smart is that? Because it’s basically a form of an actor that’s representing the character. Did you get into like any storyline stuff, like backstories of characters? Like, was there any of that in the creation?
Glenn Street: We did a little bit. So, we told the story of our character, which Harvey’s a Siberian Husky, and he’s kind of at the awkward teenage years. He kind of figures himself as a jock dog, right? But he’s still in that awkward phase, and the way he thinks things are going to go aren’t necessarily how they’re going to go. And so, from time to time, we will help the teams build that persona, as it does help the performer inside understand who the character is and what the dynamic of the character is.
Brad Johnson: Well, I have to ask, because you said LA Kings, and it’s right around the time period I think Gretzky was there. Did you get a chance to hang with Gretzky at all in this process?
Glenn Street: No. And actually, being in Calgary, all Gretzky’s years in Edmonton, no team played Edmonton more than Calgary. So, we probably saw more of Gretzky than anybody. And in fact, his brother ran a roller blade team here in Calgary for a number of years. So, I’ve met Wayne a few times. He’s an awesome guy but knew the Calgary players extremely well because we were around a lot, but the visiting team’s not as much.
Brad Johnson: Okay. So, I have to ask a question. How often are the owners of the teams in the room when you’re kind of striking the original deal, where they’re like, “Yeah, we want to hire you, Glenn, and your team to do the mascots”? A lot? A little?
Glenn Street: I would say a little. A good leader hires good people, and then delegates the role to them, and lets them do their job. And so, like in my organization here, I have two amazing women running the company. And if they have a recommendation, they’ll sit down with me, they’ll talk to me about it. And I’ll give them my input, but I will never overrule them. I’ll tell them where I see the risks, and I’ll tell them whether or not I think it’s the smart thing to do, but at the end of the day, I pay them to do that job. But we have had owners that have micromanaged and fought over a couple of hundred dollars on an invoice for work that we did. And this guy’s just paid like hundreds of millions of dollars to get the franchise.
And so, that was interesting. We wound up not getting that one. And we were very relieved we didn’t because it was just way too difficult. But most of the time, the organizations know what they want. And they’re asking for guidance, so we’ll give them guidance on design, what the characters should be, et cetera. But most of them these days, they’ve got their organizations dialed in pretty good now. And it’s not like the early days of, well, we don’t even know where to start. Well, here’s another example. Like the players, so when we started Harvey, we just started the character and Grant, my friend, who was my partner, had actually been doing the Calgary Stampeders football team mascot and built it up kind of into a national icon.
But we were really the only ones with experience. And so, when we would go and help the Kings in places like that, we were bringing in people who didn’t have mascot experience. Today, the performers, the people inside the costumes, they’ll start in high school. They’ll go to college. They’ll be in the mascot for a college, then they’ll join a farm team. They’ll be in the farm team, and then hopefully they get called up to a major league team. It’s just the same pathways players go.
Brad Johnson: Did you tell me yesterday that there are some mascots making 400,000 a year?
Glenn Street: Yeah. Some mascots are making $400,000 a year. Well, if you think about it, some of these teams are very smart, and the reason why those players or those performers get paid so much is that they have created a real persona for their character, and they’ve created real demand. And what a lot of the teams will do is they will revenue share on ancillary revenue. So, if your daughter’s having a birthday party and you want the mascot there, it may be $500 to $1,000, whatever, to have the character show up for 10, 15 minutes or whatever. The real smart teams will give most of that revenue to the performer because they want to keep him motivated. They want him to be out as much as possible because that’s their brand that is out in the community.
Brad Johnson: That’s an ambassador roaming around. Makes a lot of sense.
Glenn Street: Yeah. And I spoke at the NHL League meetings a few years ago, told our experience with the Flames. And Calgary’s a hockey-mad city. In fact, they’re building a new arena right now. And the VP, when I finished my story, the VP stood up and he said, “You have to understand, Glenn is telling the truth here. We could take our mascot, and we could take our iconic player. We could send them down the street together in Calgary. More people are going to know who the mascot is.” And the teams, they control the mascots. They can ask a player to be there. He may or may not show up. The mascot, if they say the mascot’s going to be there, it’s going to be there because he’s an employee, a direct employee of the organization.
So, the teams that do it really well try to win for everybody because they win just by having that character out in the community, interacting with people and the kids at that birthday party saying, “Hey, let’s go to a game.”
Brad Johnson: The IP that’s created, like if I just look from a business standpoint, so now you’ve created kind of an icon for the brand that’s unique because it can go out into the community and kind of spread the word and create an experience. And also, I mean, I just look at, like look at Disney. If you really break down the business model, it’s like, okay, they created these movies, but the movie was like a commercial to go buy the stuff, where it’s like go buy the stuffed animals, go to the theme park. So, I’m sure the business model, if you look at pro sports, probably isn’t that different if they’re selling little stuffed animals. There’s IP and additional revenue that the whole experience is creating, right?
Glenn Street: Sure. So, what the team can do is, first of all, it adds to the entertainment value within the building, right? Having the character there on breaks or whatever, the character can be interacting with the crowd, getting the whole stadium going in some cases. They can build promotions around the character, mascot birthday party, or something like that. They can bring in new sponsorships tied around the mascot. So, La-Z-Boy Furniture will have the best seats in the house, and it’s a couple of really nice recliners. And the mascot will take the people from the worst seats in the house and lead them down, and that draws attention to that promotion. There’s the appearances that I talked about, and there’s the licensing and merchandising.
So, if they do it really well, these characters become profit centers for them. And I don’t know where else you can add to the entertainment value and the fun to your brand and actually make money out of it.
Brad Johnson: And you think about, you just mentioned like the pro players that are actually on the teams. Unfortunately, this day and age, they need more money. They go to a different team, but the mascot, that’s the player that’s on the team forever, because, obviously, if the guy or girl inside of the suit moves on, the crowd doesn’t know it. It’s still the same character right there in front of them. So, it’s almost like this pillar. They can start to build the brand on that they don’t have to worry about leaving and going down the street later on. If you can share what’s ballpark of like the teams doing this well, the sort of additional revenue a mascot is driving to the actual business?
Glenn Street: I don’t have those numbers, but if performers are revenue sharing and they’re getting paid because the team was able to get the local Ford dealership to become a sponsor and part of that is that the mascot has to come to the dealership three times over the season, and the performers’ getting paid for that, and getting paid well. And then all these other appearances and Valentine’s Day delivering roses if you’re there with your wife, roses to your wife because you’ve paid to have that happen. As I said, part of it is the entertainment value, and they become a really important asset. And they become an important asset as well because not everybody at the game is necessarily a fan of the game.
And so, again, I may take my wife to a baseball game. She would have no clue about baseball. She’s not into sports, but if the character is roaming around the crowd and creating all these moments of entertainment. Or even if I am a big fan, but the team sucked in the game, I may be walking away going, “Yeah. Team should have won that one. They were terrible. But wasn’t that funny what Mascot did over here? That made the game for me.” So, the teams now aren’t in the sports business. They’re in the entertainment business. And so, the mascot, it can become a part of that entertainment when the game itself isn’t actually happening during the breaks and things.
Brad Johnson: Well, there’s a very big example that has kind of taken over pro sports, if you want to call it pro sports. The Savannah Bananas, who have really, they’ve turned it into a spectacle of entertainment where it’s almost like the game’s secondary. And now, I feel like they’re creating their own league. There’s other teams that are popping up. How has that changed the dynamic of just how you see mascots and like, just kind of the future of sports and business, and entertainment?
Glenn Street: Well, I think it just reinforces. We’ve worked with them, and I think it just reinforces like the Savannah Bananas is all about entertainment. It’s like the Harlem Globetrotters. Most people that go to the Harlem Globetrotters aren’t basketball fans. They go because they know they’re going to have fun and they’re going to be entertained. And so, yeah, so we’ve seen this emerging over a number of years, and what’s interesting was it was all the older, original teams in all the leagues that were the last to adopt mascots, generally speaking, because they would go, “Oh, well, that’s not hockey. That’s not baseball.” So, they got pulled in kicking and screaming until they realized, “Hey, actually, if we do this right, it can add to the experience of everybody in the building.”
Brad Johnson: How often does a pro sports team, and I want to get into some of the branding, because I want to apply this to finance a bit, but I’m just now curious, how often does a brand or a team do a refresh or just straight up change their mascot? Like, it was this, it’s not really engaging the crowd, it’s kind of old. Is that often that they’re like, “Throw that one away. Create a new one”? Or is it just more of like an update of the image that tends to happen?
Glenn Street: Yeah. It’s interesting. I could give you multiple stories where fans are saying they don’t like our mascot. We’re going to do a wholesale change. And they bring out the new character, and because it’s changed, all of a sudden, the fans are going, “Oh, where’s the guy from last year? He’s our mascot. We miss him.” And you especially see this in colleges with alumni, right? “It’s been a tradition in our school for 40 years, and you’re not going to change it.” And so, when we work with some teams, Iowa State I think it was, Herky, where it needed an update, but they knew if they just did change it like that, that the traditionalists would be saying, “That’s not our tradition. You’ve messed with tradition here.”
So, what we did is we did a couple of iterations over a few years of this character, and it’s like when your friend shaves their mustache off, right? They shave off their mustache, and the next time you see them, you go, “There’s something different about you but I can’t really figure out what it is.” And so, that’s what we try to do. We try not to do a wholesale change. We try to do an evolution. So, it’s still the character, but something seems different, but I’m not sure what it is.
Brad Johnson: Interesting. It’s like the old analogy of boiling the frog, you just slowly turn up the temperature. That makes a lot of sense, yeah, because it’s, “Oh, we don’t like the mascot, but wait, where’s the old mascot that nobody liked that now everybody misses.” I could see that playing out. That’s just human nature. Well, let’s go back to, you’ve got an audience here of entrepreneurs that happen to be financial advisors.
Glenn Street: Sure.
Brad Johnson: Many of them, and a lot of the work we do at Triad, is helping them build a distinct brand in a very commoditized market. Now, the interesting thing with pro sports teams, there are only so many of them, so everybody’s kind of got a little bit of a monopoly in their local market. So, you’re helping create a distinct brand that way. But if you were dealing with an advisor, that there’s one on every street corner in most big cities, what sort of things would you start to ask yourself or think about if you’re an advisor that needs to start to create a distinct brand? Maybe they don’t have a mascot running around, but I’m sure a lot of this applies to them.
Glenn Street: Yeah. Who do you want to be the guy known for? It’s simply that. Like, as I say, there are so many financial advisors that how do you break through the noise of everybody being there? Well, again, we didn’t go wide. We went deep. We were the sports mascots guys. That’s a real niche. It’s worked out really well for us. If you were, say a teacher, would you rather work with somebody who will work with anybody or work with somebody who sits down and says, “Okay, I specialize in working with teachers because I know that you have some special needs and some special challenges. And so, I understand you and what you’re going through better than anybody else in the industry.” That’s what we said to the LA Kings, right?
You can go to Disney. You can go to Universal Studios. They’ll make you a theme park mascot. You’re not a theme park. And so, that’s the thing I would say is what do you want to be known for? That guy, “Oh, you’ve got to talk to that person about if you need this, talk to that person.” And we were talking about Stu and Amy earlier. Stu does memberships, and he teaches that the more you can niche down, the more successful you’re going to be because the more of the people that you resonate with are going to be gravitated to you, more of those people. So, yeah, don’t try and do everybody. Pick the niche you want to be in and then learn the problems in those niches and learn about transformation.
Everybody has a situation that they’re here, here’s where they are, and here’s where they want to be, and then what are the steps to get them there? And it’s a story about transformation. I worked with this teacher who was in debt and had no savings. And within five years, we cleared off all her credit cards, and now she’s got $200,000 of savings, and she’s feeling like she’s going to be okay when she retires, and she’s going to be able to afford college for her kids and those things. So, those are the points I would make. When we were in Kenya, I was sitting by the pool. You probably don’t remember this. I snapped a picture and put it on WhatsApp. I was reading Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller. He’s just rewritten the book.
And I learned about the book because a very close friend of mine runs a video production company, and we were out for beers one night, about eight of us, all business owners, and he said, “Guys, I read a book that’s completely changed my business and changed how I present my clients to the public, or how I tell their story. And it was this book, Building a StoryBrand.” Everybody says they’re the best at what they do or whatever. People don’t care about that. They want to know how are you going to help them, and how are you going to make their lives better. Everybody says they’re the best in the world.
Brad Johnson: Well, one of my friends, the way he puts it, which I love, he is like, “Yeah, we’re going to talk about your favorite subject, you.” Everybody’s favorite subject is themselves. And StoryBrand, what I love about that book, it’s like I think a lot of companies try to make themselves the hero. What Donald talks about is, no, your client is the hero. You’re just the one helping them on their journey, which is exactly what you’re saying. So, I love that.
Glenn Street: Yes.
Brad Johnson: Well, the other thing, Glenn, that I picked up, just as you shared back to the niche that you were diving deeper in, you said start to understand the problem specific there. And one of the things you mentioned, okay, well, we’ve got to have a costume that you can perform in, run up and down stairs, and some teams probably do some acrobatic sort of stuff in it or at least some sort of movement skits. The other thing though, you said, hey, in the early days of mascots, people didn’t know how to be a mascot. So, you would literally run the auditions for who will be the mascot once we deliver it. I’m assuming that was just something you learned as you were meeting with teams, like that was something you had to add on to serve them, or was that just out of the gates, you already knew that when you just started it?
Glenn Street: Yeah. I think, right out of the gates, we knew that we could solve that problem for them and we knew that nobody else could. So, right out of the gates, it was like– and that’s why originally, the Flames awarded the contract. The question to Grant at the time was, “Why should I hire you?” And he said, “Because I’m going to be turn-key. You’re not going to have to manage me. You’re just going to have to pay me to show up at the games like the organ player and I’ll be there.” So, I’m taking it completely off here.
Brad Johnson: So, he was the original mascot inside of the costume too.
Glenn Street: Yeah, he had been doing the local football team and had made quite a name for that character. So, he was kind of known or the character was known, and so, he went and pitched the idea of the Flames having it too.
Brad Johnson: Very cool. Okay, so let’s just say, let’s go to imaginary world here. This’ll be fun for you, I hope. So, let’s say Brad, the financial advisor here in Lawrence, Kansas, I’m like, you know what? Triad, although we work with advisors, let’s just say Triad wants a mascot.
Glenn Street: Sure.
Brad Johnson: Is that possible in finance, do you think? Like, how would that work?
Glenn Street: Well, sure it is. Well, let me give you a quick summary story and then we can dive in a little bit more. Couple years ago, there’s a local realtor and a local mortgage broker that worked together and they created caricatures of their themselves that when there’s a community event on, they send their caricatures of themselves out because they get noticed. He’s with RE/MAX, and RE/MAX puts in those blow-up tents and things like that, but it’s still kind of hard to differentiate yourself from all the other realtors that are there. So, he created a caricature of him. We’ve done them for the CBS, I think it was, the caricatures of the announcers, the mascots. Sometimes, you’ll see…
Brad Johnson: Oh, does GameDay have that? Does College GameDay have like Lee Corso and those guys? Did they actually have mascot heads of themselves at one point?
Glenn Street: Yep. Well, they might. I don’t know who all we’ve done, but– so I mean, there’s a real way that somebody thought of a way to stand out from all the other realtors in the city, right? So, I mean, I would start the conversation, who’s your customer? What are you known for? What are your core values? Who is your customer? What is the end result? What do you want to be known for? And what is the end result you’re trying to achieve for your clients?
And probably, it’s going to go one or two ways. It’s going to be, maybe it’s a character and it’s an animal, and it would be an animal that’s known for– an owl for wisdom, a meerkat for alertness, something like that, that kind of thing you want to portray. Or maybe it’s a caricature of your ideal customer living their ideal life. It’s Fred, the golfer, or whatever. And I made it because of Brad and his team. So, I mean, that’s a very loose conversation, but that’s where we start is, what are you known for? What do you want to be known for? What do you stand for? What are your core values? And what’s the change that you happen for your customer because really, that’s ultimately what the customer cares about, right?
Brad Johnson: Now, I got my wheels turning, Glenn. So, I’m like, because– good. There was an idea, this was probably 10 years ago. Do you guys have something called Flat Stanley up there in Canada? Have you ever heard of that concept?
Glenn Street: No.
Brad Johnson: So, it’s this little grade school project where you get Stanley and he’s on a piece of paper and you cut him out and he’s like this tall. And you color them or whatever, grade schoolers do. And then Flat Stanley, you mail around, and basically, your relatives take pictures with Flat Stanley. So, Flat Stanley kind of travels and you get all these pictures and stories back of his adventure. And we actually had some advisors at the time. They created this caricature for themselves and they would have their clients take them on vacation with them. So, it’s like, okay, they’re in Antarctica. Oh, they’re in Paris. And so, they’re traveling the world and then they would post pictures and do contests and that sort of thing. Like, who got the most people in the picture with Flat Stanley? Who took the picture furthest away? And I could see like a– and that was super popular. They do this kind of fun contest with their clients and it was them kind of living out their retirement stuff and showing examples of it.
And so, now, a prospective client comes in. They’re walking down this hallway, here’s all these pictures of all of the dreams they made happen. So, I could see a version of the mascot kind of playing into that and being the real-life version of Flat Stanley walking around and doing their thing. So, I’m curious, there’ll probably be an advisor listening into this. They’re going to hit you up there and be like, all right, Glenn, how much does it cost to create a mascot of myself, right? What does a costume, like a high-end, real-life pro mascot, cost to build and manufacture?
Glenn Street: So, I would say if people were to budget and I’m going to throw out a high number because I hate it when people low ball and then, oh, but you didn’t tell me you want to choose with the character. So, if they were to budget $12,000 to $18,000, $18,000 is going to be more than enough. Probably it’s going to be around $15,000. It’s just a direct reflection of time and materials really.
Brad Johnson: And that’s to have the same caliber of a mascot that a pro team would have walking the sidelines.
Glenn Street: Yes, definitely. No, it’s not outrageous.
Brad Johnson: Well, the clock is ticking. So, what I want to do, as we were kind of chatting before we hit record, you said one of the things going to the actual business you’ve built, which has been a very successful one. You’ve got just over 30 team members. And you shared earlier you’ve got two people in charge of running the business. And I know you operate under kind of the EOS, the visionary, the integrator model. But you shared something that hit home. You said, hey, we have core values, but more importantly, we want to live them. And one of the things you mentioned was just some rituals you have inside of the company to make sure they’re not just something up on a wall that nobody knows what they are, and everybody forgets. So, can you share some of that, if you don’t mind?
Glenn Street: Sure. So, we have six core values, and I’m a huge believer in core values. If you do it right, your core values become the DNA of the organization. You don’t need a whole lot of rules and policy if you are rigid on your core values. A great example is a friend of mine started what is now Canada’s second biggest airline, WestJet. He and I sat on a board together of a hundred and some million-dollar company, and he said, “Glenn, making a decision for us was never difficult.” For example, they never had baggage fees, luggage fees, and he said, “because we would hold it up to the scrutiny of our core values and they wouldn’t align. And if it didn’t lift under the scrutiny of the bright lights of our core values,” his exact words, “we wouldn’t do it.”
So, being a great workplace with respect was one of their core values. Well, charging for luggage violated that core value because people would show up with their luggage, be told you got to be paid. Now, there’s confrontation with your ticket people at the check-in counter. Then, the people get smart. They start packing their bags. They put too much in. They carry them onto the planes. Now, your flight attendants are having to deal with all this extra stuff on the plane. And they’re not going to be happy and there’s a higher chance of injury. So, I’m a huge believer in core values, but you just can’t write them out, put them on the wall. You have to live them day by day and you have to celebrate them and you have to have full color stories about them.
So, we do a daily huddle every day at 9:36 in the morning, 9:36 because if I say 9:30, guess what happens? 9:36 is a very definite time. 9:30 is not. 9:30, some people will be there at 9:28. Some people will roll in at 9:32. So, 9:36 is a very definite time. We start with the core value of the day. because we have six core values. So, they’ll read off the core value for whatever day of the week it is. We go through what’s going on in the organization that day. We have some announcements. And then we finish off with our last core value, which is a reminder to our team, have fun. We’re not solving world problems here. We want them to keep perspective of even if we’re under the gun, this is still, we’re bringing fun to people.
One of the things that we do as well is we have what we call character references. And people have probably seen the notes, high five notes. We’ve just adapted them to our business. It is called character references. So, here’s one here that I pulled for one of our team members, and I’ll read it to you. It’s to Giselle from Masha. The core values that they showed were customer care, be the customer, in excellence, be your best. Quality is king. You help me. Thanks for helping me with Tyler Junior College. Nice to have you on the team.
Now, what happens with this is at the end of every month, people fill these out, they go in a box. And at the end of every month, we draw one, and the person who wrote it and the person who it is addressed to both get one of those Costco movie-for-two passes. And all we’re trying to do is reinforce teamwork and people working together and recognizing. And then the other thing that we do is during the daily huddle, we will read one of these every day just to remind everybody of who we are, what we stand for, and how we work as a team. And so, the team love it. Well, we get more than one a day because we have to read some days two or three to get through to the end of the month. But it’s just the way of giving everybody a pat in the back and recognizing and rewarding those actions that we want to reinforce and tying them back to our core value.
Brad Johnson: I love that. One of the things that I often say to the team is if you think gratitude, share gratitude because it’s just like, it’s the biggest gift that’s ungiven if you don’t express it. So, I love that you have a process and a system that not only encourages gratitude for others, but rewards gratitude. And one of the things as we were talking through that that I shared with Brooke on our team, I was like, okay, well, we do something called a DBDL award, Do Business, Do Life. Not too different than yours, but we only reward the person receiving. I’m like, we need to start rewarding the people sharing it. And I love that you reward both sides because there’s great culture builders on both sides of that equation.
Glenn Street: Great. Well, and it allows you to reward the actions that you want to see.
Brad Johnson: Are there other rituals in a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis that your team does that help reinforce the culture you want to have?
Glenn Street: Well, there are a number of things. As you said, we run on EOS primarily. Although the daily huddles is from Verne Harnish and Gazelles. But I do a weekly L10 meeting with my two implementers. One is the general manager of the company, the other one is the production manager. Everybody in our organization has a key number and I go through all those key numbers with them. And the way I get those key numbers is I ask one question, what are the one to three numbers I need to know whether you’re doing your job or not? So, with my sales guys, it’s how many did you sell. It’s that simple. I don’t need to know how many cold calls you made.
And like, I had a friend whose company was bought and they brought in Salesforce, and senior management who was a big company started focusing on numbers that weren’t really important. If the guy is a sales guy, you want him selling. And so, with my production manager, her key number is the direct cost is a percentage of revenue. And what that tells me, it can only be three things that are wrong. We’re either underquoting something or taking too long to do something or we have way too much inventory. Those are the only three things that number would tell me. But it can tell me how the team is performing on the floor.
Now, she takes it down to every team member and they go through their efficiencies project by project, and also their efficiencies over the year. And we have some rewards, and I could spend three hours talking about this, but– so we have a salary grid and we tell our team, you don’t have to come to us to ask us for a raise. We’re going to show you what you need to do to earn a raise. So, it’s based on efficiency over a three-month period, plus learning additional skills because then your value becomes higher to the company. So, that’s the first thing we do.
We also have this little chart that we do that recognizes little things that they do, and each time they do something, they’ll collect one or two points. And once they have 30 points, we give them a $25 gift card. Again, that’s reinforcing the actions that we want to see. And what’s really interesting, if somebody’s getting points really quickly, that tells us we need to look at whether or not they should be moved up on the pay scale because they’re hitting their numbers real fast. And so, we do that, we do our daily huddles, which is a conversation about what’s happening today.
Since we started those daily huddles, our warranty work has dropped to almost zero because the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. So, the person who’s building the body of this character and the person who’s building the head, oh, that reminds me, I need to talk to you. How is the neck of my costume going to fit with the head that you’re building right now? We do that. We do a really interesting thing. On everybody’s anniversary, we give them cash, $100 per year that they’ve worked for us. And what I do is I would just like, I don’t hand them a check, I go and I get $100 bills. I put on this red schlocky game show host jacket and I come down and I am in the voice of a game show. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It’s time for another exciting edition of It’s Your Day.” And just make it a ton of fun.
And I say, today’s contestant joined us less than five years ago and they try to figure out who that is. And when they do, that is absolutely correct. And then I have the studio audience count along with me and five years, how much is that? $500. And then we count along. And then, I will say, and that $500 brings their total winnings to, and I’m just picking a number right now, $1,100. So, the best example I can give is last week I was away, my general manager did it. It was to our sales person who’s been with us 20 years. He got $2,000 and his lifetime winnings were $20,000. So, you don’t have to work 25 years and get a gold watch from us.
And people say, well, why do you do that? Well, the reality is, if that individual was to leave us, it would cost me more than $2,000 to replace them. And again, it pulls into the culture that we’re a fun environment. We’re a respectful environment. We acknowledge people. And everybody else around that table while this is going on is thinking, oh, yeah, mine’s next month. It’s going to be my turn. I’m going to get my cash. So, that’s one of the rituals we do as well.
Brad Johnson: I love that, Glenn. And one of the things that’s really cool that I’ve picked up in a few pieces of this conversation is I think it’s almost a requirement. If you’re going to be a mascot company, you better have fun because I mean, that’s literally what you’re selling to your customers. So, if you don’t embody that and attract a team that knows how to have fun, it’s just not going to be congruent. So, I love that you’ve incorporated that into your culture and you’ve come up with creative ways to pull it off. All right, well, we’ve got just a handful of minutes, and one of the things that I quote…
Glenn Street: I want to tell you one other story about fun, please? And we talked about this before as well. So, we have two charts in our office like thermometers, and one is gross revenue for the fiscal year and the other one is number of mascots shipped. And every week, we fill that out and we update it. And if we hit our total gross revenue and we ship the number of mascots that we said we were going to ship, I take the entire team to Mexico. And so, we’ve done it for two of the last three years, and it is a tremendous team building thing that we do. The team love it. They’re bragging to their friends that my boss has taken me to Mexico. While we’re there, we do our strategic planning for the next fiscal year. So, it’s not just fun and games. We do some work there, but they’re happy to spend every morning doing some planning and getting some stuff because the stuff that we’re talking about is all about them and solving their problems.
And the cost to me is 75 cents an hour per team member. If I gave them 75 cents an hour more, they wouldn’t even know it. But this is something that’s really tangible that has just really brought the team together and, again, isn’t a lot of money, but is something very unique we do that just helps, again, build that company.
Brad Johnson: Yeah, I love that. Triad, we just got back. We were just down in Mexico a couple weeks ago and that was our first company trip down there, and it was a lot of fun. Is that just your team you take? Do you allow spouses, significant others to join that as well?
Glenn Street: We just do the team, because part of it is the purpose is working, because if we don’t do some work and we do do work when we’re there, it becomes a taxable item for them. And so, we go down. And the other thing is, if they’re bringing their significant others with them and their families, they’re going to be off with them. They’re not going to be congealing with the team.
Brad Johnson: Yeah, that makes sense.
Glenn Street: And so, we tried to do a lot of stuff together. We went on a day sale one day, and we would try to do stuff as a group, have all our meals together and things like that.
Brad Johnson: You do some good teams building.
Glenn Street: Yeah, it’s team building. We’re trying to build those bridges amongst them even stronger.
Brad Johnson: Very cool. Well, so one of the things I picked up during our time in Africa, number one, you’re super humble, and I think that’s just an incredible leadership quality. But I’ve just felt this wisdom oozing out of you. And I think wisdom is oftentimes created from some stuff you did right along the way, and oftentimes from some stuff that you didn’t and you learned from. So, if you were going to go back to, let’s pick, 1984 Glenn that’s just closing the deal with the Calgary Flames, if you had to give yourself some advice and maybe avoid some heartaches or maybe just, hey, we could have gotten there a lot quicker if we did it this way as an entrepreneur, what advice would you give yourself?
Glenn Street: Well, I am fortunate, I got to spend some time on Necker Island with Richard Branson. And what I took away from that experience was I never thought big enough. I always played small, and so, I would tell my startup self, how do you make this a $200 million company, billion-dollar company? We’re still small and we’re still niche, but that’s probably the one thing is that I just never thought big enough. And part of that was a scarcity mindset that afraid I’d lose it all and that goes back to when I started in real estate, the government the year before or a year after I started changed the rules on oil and gas in Canada and the entire industry collapsed overnight.
Houses were for sale in Calgary for a dollar and there were no buyers. That’s how bad it got. And I was working with a bunch of guys who were making millions of dollars even back then, and their income dropped to a quarter, which would still be way more than the average person was making in the really good times and they were destitute. And the good lesson I learned out of that was live to your means, not your income, but it did cause me to not maybe stretch as myself as much as I should have.
Brad Johnson: What year did you have that conversation with Richard Branson? You remember?
Glenn Street: It was probably about 8, 10 years ago. And he just thinks on a completely different plane. I mean, it was amazing just to listen to him talk because he’s thinking about much bigger global changing things, and like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and guys like that, that just seemed to have a much bigger vision of what’s needed and what they can do. We could have been a FanDuel or whatever if I had that much bigger vision.
Brad Johnson: Well, good news, you’ve done okay for yourself, Glenn.
Glenn Street: Yeah, I know, I’ve done okay, but…
Brad Johnson: Yeah. No, I love that. That’s why I asked. That’s such a great answer because I think, and I love that you, recognizing yourself, hey, I’ve had a scarcity mindset at times because I think, any entrepreneur that is honest with themselves and doesn’t let their ego get in the way, we’ve all had those moments of doubt where it’s like, why did I do this again? Man, this is hard. Man, this person comes in and quits out of the blue and you feel betrayed and sad, but it’s part of that journey. And I love that you’re looking back and you’re like, oh, here’s what I learned about myself. Oh, here’s something else I learned. And the best entrepreneurs I’ve ever met, they’ve tried to develop a lot of self-awareness.
Glenn Street: Well, I have a ton. And the other thing belief I have and I’ve told this with my two implementers as well, is we have an upside-down org chart. Our role is to make things easier for the team who are doing it. So, we are very bottom up, if you will, and we are constantly telling the team, our role is to solve your problems. And that’s really what our role is.
Brad Johnson: I love that.
Glenn Street: And I’ll give you an example. We had a meeting a couple of weeks ago that we weren’t sure we’re going to hit the number of mascots for this year. And that would devastate me only because the trip is so important. So, I said, okay, look, I’m going away. And while I’m gone, I want the two of you to have a team meeting. I want you to tell them what’s going on. I want you to be honest with them so they understand. And I want you to ask them, what do we need to do to get it back on track? Because they’re the ones that know, we don’t know. They’re the ones that are in it. And they came back with a ton of really great examples of things that we could do and we’re implementing those. If we tried it from the top down, (a) we wouldn’t have had buy-in and it would’ve been surface stuff. It wouldn’t have been meaningful deep stuff that would cause that flip. So, that’s part of, I guess, humble leadership, is I don’t have all the answers.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. That’s a great example. You help plan the battle, you don’t battle the plan, right?
Glenn Street: That’s right. Yeah.
Brad Johnson: Well, I believe you’ve got some other stuff on the agenda today. So, I’ve got my last question for you, Glenn. As you know, Do Business, Do Life, it’s the name of the podcast. It’s also the mission we’re on here at Triad is to help our members build a business that blesses their life, that doesn’t become their life. It’s really the integration of the two versus the tug of war. I saw you and your wife Peggy really living some of that. I know you’re very charitably minded. I know you love to travel and kind of have fun while you’re also a business owner. So, I’d love to hear your definition, Glenn, of what does do business, do life mean to you.
Glenn Street: Well, to me, I have a business for a reason and that’s to give me the life that I want, so I can go where I want when I want, how I want. So, my wife and I were in Rio De Janeiro last week at a conference. And so, I think, again, going back to the scarcity mindset at the start, I was just grinding it and grinding it and grinding it. Actually, a buddy of mine was on the Canadian version of Shark Tank last night, and they were really grilling him. And he’s the visionary and he’s gone out, he’s bought all these businesses and he sees bringing them all together and becoming a supplier for small retailers. And they said to him, look, your problem is that you need an implementer.
Brian Scudamore, who’s one of the dragons called Dragon’s Den, is actually a buddy of mine. He started 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, said you need an implementer because Brian’s the same way. Brian was all over the map until he brought somebody in to run it day to day. And so, make sure you understand what your role is, make sure you understand why you’ve hired other people, and then get out of their way, let them do it. And that will give you the freedom to do what you want.
I still work here, but I’m always on what’s next. Last year, we bought a competitor in Texas. Two years ago, we bought all kinds of new equipment and the team were saying, why did we buy this? Well, I don’t know, you’ll figure it out. I knew exactly how they were going to use it, and some ways that they discovered that I didn’t know. But I’m always on what’s next and here we’re going here, and I don’t get myself involved day to day. And that gives me the freedom to be able to go to Africa. And so, if you’re running a business and you don’t feel that you can get away, then I would encourage you to assess where you are in that business. We all like to feel important, but it feels way better to be away and know that everything’s fine.
And the best example I can give you is, on 12/12/12, I had well planned for open heart surgery to fix a defect in my heart and I couldn’t come back to the shop for three months. And when I finally came back, the response from my team was, oh, you’re back. Good. And that was it. Nobody’s running up, grabbing my arm, oh, thank God, you’re here. I need to talk to you. This happened. It ran better without me there because I had the right people in place and I gave them the trust to do their jobs. And in order to get trust, you have to give trust first. And so, that’s what I would say. Again, a long-winded answer to what I think is a great question.
Brad Johnson: Well, I think the answer eclipsed the question. So, that was a lot of wisdom there, Glenn. And I really, really enjoyed hanging with you and your wife in Africa. And hopefully, we get another chance to do something in person here around the corner. So, until next time where hopefully, we get to do it in person. It’s been a pleasure and loved the conversation today.
Glenn Street: Brad, great to see you. We’re going back, I think, in 2028, so maybe you’ll be there.
Brad Johnson: Just do our biannual trip to Africa and hang out for a couple weeks, right?
Glenn Street: Yeah, yeah.
Brad Johnson: Cool. Hey, I’ve heard worse ideas, so I like it. All right, Glenn, well, hey, happy Friday. Enjoy your weekend and look forward to the next time.
