Speaker 1: When I see young people, I can't help but think that they want what I wanted. And that is a rewarding, fulfilling career where I can advance and lead. And I see that in other people. And having that instilled into our current leaders has caused them to say, well, I want younger people. I want some of the newer people to experience now the path that I've taken. And it's very rewarding. PolarEd provides scoreboards and score tables to high schools. We own the inventory around these scoreboards and score tables, and that's how we're able to generate enough revenue to give it to the schools. My role has really changed over the years. In the beginning, I was everything.

Speaker 2: When I got here, it was a very flat company. Bob and Jen were at the top. They were very involved, but they were managing basically everybody in the company.

Speaker 1: When we started moving into a point where we had to have managers manage the different divisions, it had a lot to do with their pure ability. But what we learned pretty quick is, it was just as much about the character of the person and the work ethic of the person as it did, are you good at what you do?

Speaker 2: Specifically for my department, we had no manager. And so after a while, I kind of found myself having a desire to help and train, and people would come to me just, I think, mostly out of tenure, but I also had some sales success.

Speaker 1: Kyleen has that balance that she can be no-nonsense, very strong, and it's out of care and compassion.

Speaker 2: So after a while, I said, Bob, Jen, I'm kind of managing or leading the department. Can we make this official? And they gave me a go and gave me a try.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd like to tell you that we figured that out and we knew exactly when Kyleen walked in the door, she was going to be this, but that would be crazy. Our leadership team now is my wife, Jen, myself, Kyleen as CEO, and Jenny, COO. We're very different people. The single biggest thing we have in common, though, is our compassion and our care for

Speaker 2: one another. Leadership development here is interesting because it's not formal. We don't have it written out, right? This is how we're going to leadership, develop, and train, and recognize individuals. It's much more organic.

Speaker 1: At Jen's initiative, the first thing that we did was she had a discipleship huddle that all four of us went into and were trained.

Speaker 2: We learned the discipleship square and huddle, and so it's something that the leadership team really embraced.

Speaker 1: We began reading books together. Then we began going to things like the leadership summit. That is when discussion started to happen about the C12 key players.

Speaker 2: The key player program's been really instrumental. It's given us a common language here at PowerADD and a common mission and values that we began discussing as a result of C12.

Speaker 1: Developing leaders is consistent with our mission statement. We want to positively affect people's lives. We want to make a difference. We strive to do that with every one of our employees and certainly our leaders.

Speaker 2: For example, Andrew started as my assistant nine years ago. Now he's the director of sales. It really took me digging in and empowering him, trusting him. I used to be very guilty of giving somebody a task and walking away and going on with my day and waiting to see if they sunk or swam. That was not very successful. So it's walking through the square, walking along with him, showing him how I do things. It elevated his career, but also elevated mine at the same time.

Speaker 1: We had a goal to invest in people and create leaders, not necessarily for succession, but create leaders. The next natural step is let them lead.

Speaker 2: Bob and Jen laid this beautiful foundation, and now it's our job to do the same, which we're doing with Andrew and others, but also tasking Andrew with identifying what leaders below him he needs to develop. I think we're always trying to find individual and personal talents of people and try to make those shine, whether it is just a salesperson or a future leader, future manager, future CEO.