The Business & Faith Podcast®

Most firing decisions have nothing to do with performance.

In this episode of The Dataliction Podcast®, John Staub talks with John James, president and CEO of Flex Tech, the Texas staffing firm he built for the low-voltage and electrical trades. John has been in staffing since 1994, and he says that nine times out of ten, a leader thinking about letting someone go is looking at a core values problem wearing a performance costume. He explains why keeping a mismatched employee costs more than replacing one, what goes into an Ideal Candidate Profile before a role is ever posted, and the five things his team screens for that a résumé will not tell you. Then he describes shutting off about $4,500 a month in job board spend because he was fishing in the same pond as every competitor, and the four days with a spiral notebook that produced the plan he still runs on.

Chapters:

• 00:00 Four Days and a Spiral Notebook
• 00:28 Meet John James and Flex Tech
• 01:19 Firing Is Almost Never About Performance
• 02:39 Why Waiting Costs More
• 04:31 Core Values as the Real Filter
• 06:21 The Ideal Candidate Profile
• 07:47 Two Hires and What Changed Between Them
• 10:35 Losing a Job and Learning Empathy
• 13:42 Thirty Seconds After the Prayer
• 16:47 The Five Things
• 21:00 Stop Copying Your Competitors
• 22:40 Turning Off the Job Boards
• 27:16 The Sabbatical That Made the Plan

Connect with the host and guest:

• John Staub: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-staub/
• Travis Hall: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-m-hall/
• John James: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnjames2700/
• Flex Tech: https://flextechnow.com
• Dataliction: https://dataliction.com

The Business & Faith Podcast—learning from leaders whose experience and faith shape how they grow their organizations on purpose. New episodes weekly. Brought to you by Dataliction. Follow us and keep the conversation going. Enjoy this episode? Leave a review and share it with someone who needs to hear it!

Her doctor reached for a prescription when the answer was sitting in her lab work.

Fatigue sent Gina Rogean to a doctor who offered her an antidepressant she never took. In this episode of The Dataliction Podcast®, John Staub and Travis Hall talk with Gina, a board-certified nurse practitioner and the founder of GT3 Health, about the practice she built on three pillars: mind, body, and spirit. She explains why identity comes before improvement, why unresolved trauma blocks healing that vitamins alone cannot reach, and how a career that ran through a family restaurant, a Panera Bread general manager job, and a fire academy turned out to be preparation rather than detour. John and Travis connect her refusal to accept a surface answer to the way most companies read their own numbers. The question underneath the whole conversation: when the report says everything looks fine, who goes looking anyway?

Chapters:

• 00:00 God Used Every Position I Was In
• 00:30 Meet Gina Rogean and GT3 Health
• 01:22 Three Parts, One Person 03:30 Where to Start: Spirit, Mind, or Body
• 05:31 What Real Transformation Looks Like
• 08:56 It All Comes Back to Identity
• 10:32 Your Calling Is Not Your Job Title
• 12:10 Every Seat Was Preparation
• 15:00 A Vitamin D Level, Not an Antidepressant
• 17:45 How GT3 Health Got Its Name
• 21:47 Do You Love to Win or Hate to Lose
• 24:19 Why People Come In at a Low Point
• 27:21 Pulling One Thread at a Time
• 29:54 Nothing Here but Opportunity

Connect with the hosts and guest:

• John Staub: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-staub/
• Travis Hall: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-m-hall/
• Gina Rogean: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gina-rogean-aprn-bc-abaahp-4992792ab/
• GT3 Health: https://gt3health.com
• Dataliction: https://dataliction.com

The Business & Faith Podcast—learning from leaders whose experience and faith shape how they grow their organizations on purpose. New episodes weekly. Brought to you by Dataliction. Follow us and keep the conversation going. Enjoy this episode? Leave a review and share it with someone who needs to hear it!

There is only one CFO on a campus, and everyone is looking at them.

Bruce Hoeker was 29 when he took a college vice president job knowing almost nothing about higher education. In this episode of The Dataliction Podcast®, John Staub talks with Bruce Hoeker, chief executive officer of the Association of Business Administrators of Christian Colleges, about why isolation is the quiet danger in leadership and why connection is a survival skill rather than a soft one. Bruce tells the story of the conference attendee he found crying alone in an emptied room, and the sentence she gave him: I thought it was just me. He explains how an email listserv taught him the job, why he tells business officers to lift their heads up and leave the building, and where an AI chatbot stops being useful. Higher ed CFOs last about seven years, by his count. The ones who leave their desks tend to run the strongest schools.

Chapters:

• 00:00 I Thought It Was Just Me
• 00:22 Meet Bruce Hoeker and ABACC
• 01:12 A Vice President at Twenty-Nine
• 02:24 The Woman in the Empty Room
• 03:27 Only One CFO on a Campus
• 05:33 Learning the Job From a Listserv
• 08:22 Why Higher Ed Runs on Committee
• 09:26 Everyone Is Looking at You
• 10:40 Seven Years and Out
• 12:36 The Job He Was Designed For
• 17:00 Checked Boxes Are Not the Reward
• 20:53 Lift Your Head Up and Leave the Building
• 25:26 Where the Chatbot Stops Helping
• 29:44 Too Busy for the Thing That Would Help

Connect with the host and guest:

• John Staub: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-staub/
• Bruce Hoeker: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bruce-hoeker-a1778028
• ABACC: https://www.myabacc.org
• Book a free call with the Dataliction team: https://dataliction.com

The Business & Faith Podcast—learning from leaders whose experience and faith shape how they grow their organizations on purpose. New episodes weekly. Brought to you by Dataliction. Follow us and keep the conversation going. Enjoy this episode? Leave a review and share it with someone who needs to hear it!

Most of what looks like a snap decision was made years earlier.

In this episode of The Dataliction Podcast®, John Staub talks with John Porter, president of Charter Properties, the Charlotte firm developing apartment communities across the Carolinas where he has spent 27 years and led for the last eight. Porter says his first 20 years made him a difficult man to deal with, until a situation he could not fix humbled him. He explains why compromise wrecks a culture faster than a bad hire does, why he sent an interview panel back to the drawing board when one person out of five did not feel right, and what happened when a $70 million deal walked in with a two-week clock on it. The thread running through all of it is preparation. The foundation gets laid long before the decision shows up.

Chapters:

• 00:00 Humbled Twenty Years In
• 00:25 Meet John Porter and Charter Properties
• 01:19 What Compromise Costs a Culture
• 02:19 Where Good Hiring Actually Starts
• 05:04 The Situation He Could Not Fix
• 06:00 Humble Confidence and Stewardship
• 07:34 Every Hire Changes the Culture
• 11:49 Deciding What Is Non-Negotiable
• 14:04 Three Values the Team Can Recite
• 18:37 Many Advisors, One Decision
• 21:00 Why the 11th Hour Is the Worst Time
• 25:22 The $70 Million Deal on the Clock
• 28:37 What Transition Looks Like Now
• 32:04 The Habit He'd Keep: Curiosity

Connect with the host and guest:

• John Staub: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-staub/
• John Porter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-porter-9511a618/
• Charter Properties: https://www.charterproperties.com
• Dataliction: https://dataliction.com

The Business & Faith Podcast—learning from leaders whose experience and faith shape how they grow their organizations on purpose. New episodes weekly. Brought to you by Dataliction. Follow us and keep the conversation going. Enjoy this episode? Leave a review and share it with someone who needs to hear it!

Praying for the work to come in is not the same as knowing whether you can make payroll.

In this episode of The Dataliction Podcast®, John Staub and Travis Hall talk with Parker Perrien, co-CEO of Diamond Solutions, the national asphalt and concrete company he bought from his father at 23. Parker grew it to 50 employees in four years without reviewing a P&L, and by 2018 the company was bankrupt on paper. A mentor named Ron pulled him out, millions of dollars of debt cleared, and the numbers started working so well that Ron, in Parker's words, functionally became his God. He walks John and Travis through the swing back: six core values the company hires, fires, and pays bonuses against, a mission to worship with their work, and a practice he calls pray and watch. The tech story lands last, and it is the reason Diamond runs about ten times the volume it did eight years ago with fewer employees.

Chapters:

00:00 Bankrupt on Paper at Fifty Employees 
00:19 Meet Parker Perrien and Diamond Solutions 
01:10 Why Traction Beat Business School 
02:17 Core Values You Actually Hire and Fire By 
04:35 Making Values Survive the Org Chart 
09:12 Tech That Reinforces the Behavior 
11:54 God First and a Counseling Degree 
13:38 Two Weeks From Missing Payroll 
15:06 When a Mentor Becomes a Substitute for God 
15:51 The Diagnosis That Shook Him Awake 18:20 We Exist to Worship With Our Work 
21:13 Pray and Watch 
25:37 Two CEOs, One Repeatable Process 28:29 Let Computers Do Computer Work

Connect with the hosts and guest:

John Staub: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-staub/

Travis Hall: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-m-hall/

Parker Perrien: https://www.linkedin.com/in/parker-perrien

Diamond Solutions: https://www.thediamondsolutions.com

Dataliction: https://dataliction.com

The Business & Faith Podcast—learning from leaders whose experience and faith shape how they grow their organizations on purpose. New episodes weekly. Brought to you by Dataliction. Follow us and keep the conversation going. Enjoy this episode? Leave a review and share it with someone who needs to hear it!

Every leader carries a weight the people around them never see.

In this episode of The Dataliction Podcast®, John Staub and Travis Hall talk with Wesley Mast, president of Coppes Napanee, the 150-year-old Indiana cabinet company his family bought in 2017 to restore rather than replace. Wesley runs a shop of 25 employees and about 20 dealers, which adds up to roughly 50 people with 50 opinions and one person who has to decide. He explains how a degree in sign language interpreting taught him to read what a room is not saying, why retreating from his own team is the warning sign he watches for, and how he tells people the truth about the pressure without handing it to them. The conversation turns on a question most leaders avoid: what does it actually cost to ask? Wesley answers it with a letter to President Bush, a letter to Marcus Freeman, and a standing invitation to competitors to teach him their business.

Chapters:

00:00 A Prayer for Wisdom and the Courage to Act
00:14 Meet Wesley Mast and Coppes Napanee
01:06 The Weight of 50 Voices 02:53 One Company, One Decision 
04:51 Letting the Team See the Weight 
06:34 A Sign Language Degree and a Sixth Sense 
07:53 When Retreating Becomes the Signal 
09:19 Superpowers You Have to Turn Off 
11:09 Restoring Instead of Starting Over 
14:16 The Courage to Ask
17:46 Humility Comes Before Courage 
21:57 The Letter to President Bush 
24:23 Wisdom Without Action 
27:44 The First Question for Coach Freeman

Connect with the hosts and guest: 

John Staub: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-staub/
Travis Hall: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-m-hall/
Wesley Mast: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wesley-mast-4573b526
Coppes Napanee: https://coppesnapanee.com
Dataliction: https://dataliction.com

The Business & Faith Podcast—learning from leaders whose experience and faith shape how they grow their organizations on purpose. New episodes weekly. Brought to you by Dataliction. Follow us and keep the conversation going. Enjoy this episode? Leave a review and share it with someone who needs to hear it!

Companies die because of cash, but they stall because of leadership.

Darren Thompson spent his career at Eli Lilly and Company before a 2017 early retirement package pointed him somewhere else entirely. In this episode of The Dataliction Podcast®, John Staub talks with Darren Thompson, president and CEO of Process Alliance, about building a pharmaceutical engineering firm on people other companies overlooked. Darren explains why his team stopped screening for grade point average and started hiring for humble, hungry, and smart, why they turned down a 3.9 chemical engineering graduate, and how a monthly direct connect keeps leadership development from becoming a slide deck. He also tells the story behind RippleWorks Manufacturing, the second-chance manufacturing company he launched to hire people most employers screen out. Leaders walk away with a hiring filter, a retention argument, and a harder question about what they have been given to steward.

Chapters:

00:00 Cast the Stone
00:10 Meet Darren Thompson
01:40 Gray Hairs, No Hairs, and the First Campus Hire
03:48 Companies Die Because of Cash, They Stall Because of Leadership
06:37 Hiring Humble, Hungry, and Smart
08:04 The 3.9 GPA They Turned Down
10:57 What Leadership Looks Like to Gen Z
12:08 Where Purpose Enters the Work
13:36 Direct Connects and Pouring Into People
16:45 The Early Retirement Package That Started a Company
19:57 Twelve Chemical Engineers and a Plan
22:49 What's in Your Hand, Moses
24:49 RippleWorks and Second Chance Manufacturing
29:31 Continuous Improvement Starts With Humility

Connect:
John Staub: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-staub/
Travis Hall: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-m-hall/
Darren Thompson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenthompsonpa/
Process Alliance: https://processalliance.com
RippleWorks Manufacturing: https://rippleworksmfg.com

Mentioned:
The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

The Business & Faith Podcast—learning from leaders whose experience and faith shape how they grow their organizations on purpose. New episodes weekly. Brought to you by Dataliction. Follow us and keep the conversation going. Enjoy this episode? Leave a review and share it with someone who needs to hear it!

Trust is a currency, and a company stops growing when the owner refuses to spend it.

Eight years ago, Alex Melvin was six months into selling Rural King. In this episode of The Dataliction Podcast®, John Staub and Travis Hall sit down with Melvin, owner and chairman of Rural King, America's Farm and Home Store, to talk about the decision that kept him in the chair and how it reshaped the company after. He describes running the business for years without trusting anyone with real decisions, and what that cost in growth Rural King never captured. The conversation covers RK Cares, the associate fund that pays for funerals when families can't, why he looks for leaders who get pushed up instead of pulled up, and the single act of integrity that convinced him to hand a former Tractor Supply executive the CEO title.

Chapters:

00:00 The Moment He Almost Sold
01:06 What People First Really Means
02:33 Empowering Stores to Take Care of Customers
04:28 RK Cares and the Associate Fund
05:57 Faith and Doing the Right Thing
07:51 Trust as an Earned Currency
09:43 The Decision Not to Sell the Company
13:42 Family First Makes You a Better Leader
14:58 Integrity Is Consistency in Small Things
18:53 Pushed Up, Not Pulled Up
20:35 The Integrity Test That Made a CEO
22:14 Working on a Leader Who Didn't Want the Role
25:02 The Interview Nobody Knows They're In
27:58 What He's Excited About Now

Links
John Staub: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-staub/
Travis Hall: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-m-hall/
Alex Melvin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-melvin-7b674321b/
Rural King: https://www.ruralking.com
Book a free call with Dataliction: https://www.dataliction.com

The Business & Faith Podcast—learning from leaders whose experience and faith shape how they grow their organizations on purpose. New episodes weekly. Brought to you by Dataliction. Follow us and keep the conversation going. Enjoy this episode? Leave a review and share it with someone who needs to hear it!

Hiring leaders is easy. Letting them lead is the hard part.

Most founders hit a ceiling that has nothing to do with the market. In this episode of The Dataliction Podcast®, John Staub and Travis Hall talk with Luke Jacobs, co-founder and CEO of Encamp, about building a leadership team that can run without you. Luke bootstrapped Encamp past a million dollars in revenue and found the business could not grow past his own hands. He walks through hiring in phases, why early leaders have to be doers, and how one-way and two-way door decisions determine what stays on his desk. He also gets specific about hiring too senior too early, growing a CTO and a CRO into their seats, and treating AI as a force multiplier instead of a way to cut headcount.

Chapters:

00:00 Meet Luke Jacobs of Encamp
01:00 Building a Leadership Team in Phases
03:45 One-Way and Two-Way Door Decisions
04:48 The Home Renovation Approach to Leadership Gaps
06:27 Sync Cadence as a Trust Signal
09:00 Vetting Executives Through Your Network
11:33 Hiring Too Senior Too Early
14:49 Hungry, Humble, and Smart
17:29 Outgrowing Founder-Led Sales
20:42 Zone of Genius Versus Zone of Competence
24:18 The Enterprise Deal That Almost Broke Us
28:10 AI as a Force Multiplier, Not a Cost Saver
35:41 The Founding Story Behind Encamp
43:05 Own the Decision Yourself

The Business & Faith Podcast—learning from leaders whose experience and faith shape how they grow their organizations on purpose. New episodes weekly. Brought to you by Dataliction. Follow us and keep the conversation going. Enjoy this episode? Leave a review and share it with someone who needs to hear it!

Your industry knowledge and your title are not a sales process.

Most founders sell well long before they sell repeatably. In this episode of The Dataliction Podcast®, John Staub and Travis Hall talk with Jenny Vance, founder and CEO of GrowthJen, about why a founder's own track record is a poor blueprint for the team. Jenny explains that deep industry knowledge and the top title in the company are false positives: they let a founder win without following the fundamentals everyone else needs. She uses Michael Jordan's court vision and a Picasso painting to separate what can be taught from what cannot, then gives founders a practical order of operations. Replicate the highest-volume stage first, prove repeatability, then move down the funnel toward business cases and executive meetings. She also defines BANT and MEDDPICC, and makes the case against calling a deal advanced just because you sent a contract.

Chapters:

00:00 The Orange Rectangle Problem
00:25 Welcome and Introducing Jenny Vance
01:53 The Founder's False Positives
02:51 Michael Jordan and the Triangle Offense
04:46 Picasso, Paint Class, and Scale
07:51 What Founders Get Wrong About Letting Go
10:22 Replicating the Easiest Stage First
12:22 Simplicity as Foundation, Not Limit
13:41 Over-Engineering the Messaging Handoff
16:18 When to Invest in Sales Talent
18:55 Choosing a Sales System
20:24 The Problem With Action-Based Progression
23:13 BANT and MEDDPICC Explained
26:32 Life Outside the Process
29:29 Closing Thoughts

The Business & Faith Podcast—learning from leaders whose experience and faith shape how they grow their organizations on purpose. New episodes weekly. Brought to you by Dataliction. Follow us and keep the conversation going. Enjoy this episode? Leave a review and share it with someone who needs to hear it!