[Perspective Series] Unlocking Business Growth: How Fulfillment Drives Success With Nickie Froiland

Nickie Froiland is the Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of Motus9, a professional services and impact firm dedicated to helping organizations overcome challenges and achieve their goals. With a passion for guiding individuals to remove blind spots and discover new approaches, she excels in fostering personal and professional growth. Nickie's expertise spans business consulting, executive coaching, and operational advising, enabling clients to clearly and confidently navigate complex situations. Her commitment to creating impactful change has made her a trusted partner for businesses seeking transformation and success.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [1:52] Nickie Froiland discusses the meaning behind the name Motus9 and its focus on fulfillment

• [3:14] How Motus9 tailors executive coaching and workshops for leadership teams

• [8:19] Helping practitioners transition into effective business operators

• [14:10] Tips for aligning company culture with day-to-day operations for lasting impact

• [21:49] How accountability contributes to a better functioning company and personal empowerment

• [27:47] Nickie talks about the common business “elephants” like leadership misalignment and blind spots

• [32:23] The life-changing influence of mentorship, both positive and negative, on leadership style
  

In this episode…

Running a business involves more than simply providing excellent products or services — it also requires strong leadership, a positive company culture, and alignment of operations with a clear purpose. However, challenges arise when misalignments, unaddressed issues, or unclear leadership create barriers to growth. So, how can companies identify these hidden obstacles and develop strategies for long-term success?

Nickie Froiland, an expert in executive coaching and operational advising, dives deep into the core challenges that hold businesses back. She highlights the importance of aligning personal growth with company growth and emphasizes the role of purpose in shaping leadership and company culture. She shares strategies for fostering transparency through partner meetings, tackling misalignment head-on, and implementing frameworks like “The Company Way” to strengthen cultural and operational foundations. Nickie also stresses the importance of addressing uncomfortable truths within teams and using accountability for meaningful change.

In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Nickie Froiland, Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of Motus9, about creating purpose-driven leadership and aligning company culture with operations. Nickie explains how businesses can overcome hidden obstacles, improve accountability, and foster growth by addressing the “elephants in the room.” She also shares strategies for personal development, the value of partner meetings, and the power of having a clear company purpose to drive success.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Quik!

• Richard Walker on LinkedIn

• Nickie Froiland on LinkedIn

• Motus9

• "How To Thrive Through Customer Experience With Shelli Taylor of Alamo Drafthouse Cinema" on The Customer Wins

• "[Perspective Series] Strategies for Winning Customers: A Conversation With Peter LePiane" on The Customer Wins

• "[Perspective Series] The Bold Leadership Blueprint With Amy Riley" on The Customer Wins

• The Courage of a Leader: How to Inspire, Engage and Get Extraordinary Results by Amy L. Riley

Quotable Moments:

• "We believe every person deserves to find fulfillment, and every result grows at the rate you grow."

• "We help businesses face the elephants in the room — those tough conversations they’ve been avoiding for too long."

• "Our purpose is fulfillment. We move people toward their version of a ten, knowing it’s a journey."

• "The owner’s personality often causes issues they’re unaware of — it’s a blind spot that impacts the business."

• "You can’t grow your company beyond your own personal growth. The two are always interconnected."

Action Steps:

1. Address the "elephants in the room": Create safe spaces for teams to openly discuss challenges and misalignments to foster trust, improve communication, and remove obstacles that hinder growth.

2. Align company culture with operational strategies: Ensure your daily processes and decision-making align with your company’s core values and purpose to create consistency, strengthen company identity, and support long-term sustainability.

3. Invest in executive coaching for leadership teams: Personalized coaching helps leaders identify blind spots, improve communication, and drive personal and organizational growth. 

4. Incorporate regular partner or stakeholder meetings: Whether with business partners or key employees, these meetings strengthen alignment and address potential conflicts early. 

5. Use accountability frameworks to track progress: Implement tools and processes that hold individuals and teams accountable for their goals and responsibilities to boost productivity, encourage ownership, and support a results-driven company culture.

Sponsor for this episode...

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:02

Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn, grow their business.

Richard Walker: 00:16

Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Today is a special episode in my perspective series to bring strategic and different thinking to our audience. Today I'm speaking with Nickie Froiland, co-founder of Motus9. Some of our past guests have included in this series Shelli Taylor, the former CEO of Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, Peter LePiane of Idea Bridge, and Amy Riley of The Courage of a Leader. In today's episode is brought to you by Quik, the leader in enterprise forms processing.

When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms. Instead, get Quik! using our Form Xtract API. Simply submit your completed forms and get back clean, context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of a thousand submissions. Visit Quickforms.com to get started. All right, I'm really excited to introduce our guest today.

Nickie Froiland co-founded Motus9 with her husband in 2016 to make a meaningful impact in people's businesses and lives and help people find fulfillment. Her company, Motus9, is centered around that mission. Nickie, welcome to The Customer Wins.

Nickie Froiland: 01:32

Well. Hello, Rich.

Richard Walker: 01:34

I'm so excited to talk to you. So for those who haven't heard this podcast before, I talk with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. Nickie, let's understand your business a little better. How does your company help people?

Nickie Froiland: 01:52

Oh, I always like to start by talking about what we believe in first. So we believe that every person deserves to find fulfillment. And we also believe that every result in your life and your business grows at the rate that you grow. So we help people and their businesses find fulfillment. As a matter of fact, it's the little literal expression of our name Motus.

Motus is Latin for the word movement. Nine, it is said, is a sacred number to represent fulfillment. We move you toward fulfillment. And my favorite part is we're not Motus 10 because no one's a ten. It is a journey. We are always on our way toward being a ten. So we move you toward being a ten. And once you get to the next level, you're ready for something more. It is so fun to get to watch people grow and evolve.

Richard Walker: 02:49

Now, I love that and I met you a year ago through our entrepreneurs group. You had a huge impact on me just meeting you and having a few conversations. And I know I should have hired you because just what an impact you've had on me already. But the thing is that you are doing executive coaching workshops. Are you working with entire organizations? I know you're helping people find fulfillment, but how do you do that?

Nickie Froiland: 03:14

Yeah. Great question. And so you're talking with me, Nickie Froiland, co-founder with my husband of the company we are right now a small and mighty team of about a dozen people, and we have new coaches joining the team in January of 2025, which is incredibly exciting. So the way we help people and businesses depends on the person and the business, but there are some standard kind of makeups of how we help. We have a business that we work with there, and we work with their entire leadership team.

And so we do individual executive coaching for every member of. I think it's a total of 17. It's their C-suite and then Evp's. And we work with those 17 people. We have other clients where maybe we're working with four people on the leadership team.

So executive coaching is one framework. Another framework that we love and has such impact is partner meetings. So if you have a business partner and one thing I love to call attention to, if you have a spouse who's not in your business, you still have a business partner, especially in the state of Texas, because we are a community property state and they're your business partner. We run partner meetings, and sometimes it's with spouses, sometimes it's with literal business partners, sometimes it's with the key people of the organization. But here's what it always does.

It brings you together. It calls attention to areas of misalignment. And we get to help you have a productive conversation to get aligned. So partner meetings and executive coaching. Another thing that we do is we help organizations, faith organizations face the facts that they otherwise are intentionally or unintentionally avoiding.

We call those elephants. So there's one right here. Many of us have some elephant is in the room, and it's easy to ignore it because you think that the elephant is a little too big to actually address. We come in and we do workshops with businesses where we help them call attention to all of their elephants, and it sounds like a scary thing to do, but it is in fact a very invigorating thing to do. And I think the last piece I'll share with you is we do a piece of work called The Company Way.

And the company Way helps businesses outline their cultural and operational foundation, Usually a business has one or the other. You want your cultural foundation, and you need an operational foundation that is supportive of your desired culture. We help businesses create that, and in a recent survey, this was so fun to learn. We learned that 58% of our clients who have done that have immediately gone on to increase their revenue by 51 to 100%. Wow.

And I can't finish until I share. I can actually share a slide with you. I won't dig it up right now. There is something new that makes us even more complete, because in July we hired a CEO, and with this CEO who has 35 years’ experience growing and scaling professional services organizations, he has helped us give a new perspective to our organization. And we have added services that are called operational advising Where we help organizations get some key tools, create their KPIs, learn how to track, run standard meetings.

Exceptional. So operational advising. And then we also now help our clients prepare in advance for funding and exit. Nice. A lot to share, but pretty proud to say we are a very all-encompassing company that helps make sure that we have the tools needed to move you forward.

Richard Walker: 07:17

Yeah. And you said something I love. You're a small but mighty team. I think you've just demonstrated that. And I love the fact that you have these frameworks to work with customers on, help them see new truths, new perspectives, etc..

I'll remark that my own team is going through an elephant process. My COO and my VP of Customer Success approached me a month and a half ago and said, Rich, you suck at accountability. We need more accountability in our company. It's like, you're right. I don't like accountability.

How do we fix that? So we're defining KPIs and we're going through the process of redefining roles, and we're going to run better meetings as a result of it and hold people to more deadlines and more metrics that help us operate our company better. You know, Nickie, a lot of the people who I think listen or watch this podcast are in financial services, and a lot of financial advisors start because they love the craft of advising, not the business of advising. Do you work with people who've come from that practitioner kind of view and help them become better at business as well?

Nickie Froiland: 08:19

We work with people that come from that, that practice as well as that mindset. So many business owners started their business out of a passion or interest that they have, and then later kind of have this moment where they go, oh, wait, I'm running a business. I now have 30 employees or 50 employees or 400 employees or six employees. And I kind of need to know about this whole running a business thing. We have certainly worked with many, many financial organizations over the years.

Absolutely. And one thing that you said that I want to call attention to, because it happened today and it's a moment we're celebrating. We have a client that has four founders, and we started working with them in April, and we made progress on helping the founders acknowledge where they were disparate and start to come together. When we got that work a little bit further down the road, we then introduced operational advising, and so we've been doing operational advising for three months as of almost right now. And just today, that client stopped a meeting to acknowledge the contribution that we have made in growing their business in just that short period of time, and how having a standard way of running meetings and key items that we track on a regular basis has made a significant impact in the overall health of their organization, so that feels pretty great.

Richard Walker: 09:59

No, that is awesome. I love it when you can point to success stories like this and know that your efforts are having a real, meaningful impact on your clients. There's something else you said earlier that I also want to touch on, which is the amount your company grows is dependent on how you personally grow. I don't know exactly how you phrase it, but it's something along those lines, right? So I want to also talk about that because I've had that experience throughout my career as an entrepreneur.

People have always said, Rich, read more books. Well, first of all, I don't like reading books. Then I discovered audible in 2012 or something like that, and I started listening to books voraciously. In fact, I was at least one a month, if not one a week. And my gosh, within a few years things.

I mean, our revenue started to go up 50% a year, year over year over year. And I really tie it back to the lessons I was learning from that. So how is it? How do you help people go through personal development and see that? Because, I mean, coaching and pointing out, hey, you should have KPIs is one thing, but what about the personal side of things?

How do you help people evolve and grow and really get out of that practitioner mindset, even to become business operators?

Nickie Froiland: 11:08

Yeah. Well, a couple of things I'll call attention to is, number one, you're going through it again right now because your team has recently said, hey, Rich, we need a culture of accountability in our organization, and you're not bringing that. And so now you're looking at a new way that you can grow. Our clients often call us their accountability partner. And we have an app where we keep track of what you said you're going to do and did you get it done.

And then we also track what are the elephants and what are the blind spots and what are some key nuggets that you took away? Several things get tracked on the app. So that's one thing is this is back to what I said before moving toward fulfillment. We're moving toward being a ten. There is no time that we can just check that off the list and we're done growing.

You are now at your next phase of growth, and you will again when you find a way to bring accountability into your organization and you start to practice it as well, you will again see meaningful growth in your organization. It will happen. I think what is very interesting is we can go to therapy, and for some reason we don't take what we learn in therapy. I'm speaking for myself here. I'm some other people are nodding their heads too.

But we don't take what we learn in therapy and translate it into how can we apply this in our business? We just don't naturally do that. Well, we're not therapists, but the effect of our work is, in fact, therapeutic. And when you learn how to evolve, improve, advance something in your business, what's fascinating is you often figure out a way to then apply it to life. I don't know why the opposite isn't true, and maybe for some people it is, but for most that I've run into, it isn't.

But when you learn how to apply something, grow, evolve in your business, it makes an easier transfer into life.

Richard Walker: 13:10

You know, it's funny, I was just talking to somebody about I'm not going to go off the deep end here on ChatGPT with AI and how a lot of business leaders are just reluctant to go try it out. And it's really kind of the opposite. The best way to really learn it is do something personal with it, like have it generate a recipe so you get personal fulfillment, and then you'll start to say, oh, I could use this for my business, but I think you're totally right. In fact, I don't know if, you know, I wrote a book on how to change. It's a four step methodology for any kind of change you want to make, and I do apply it to business.

In fact, I think you saw that because you awakened inside of me something I hadn't paid attention to. And I was like, boom, I'm changing it. And oh my gosh, like I said, had a profound impact on our business this year. Let's go back to company culture a little bit, because that's also one of my favorite topics. I view company culture as the foundation of the company.

But you said you have to align the operations to that. What does that mean exactly?

Nickie Froiland: 14:10

You know, normally we're very good at being able to take a phrase to explain our work. This is one where I have struggled to find a concise way of defining what that means. Let me see. When you understand your purpose. Your purpose is then the bedrock for the culture.

You then need to must really define how will you operate, function, make decisions, do the day to day in support, not contradiction of your purpose. So too many people. By the way, thank you for working with me and my t-shirt. You said the podcast is a bit of a gift, and I'm bringing a gift of love today. And we have a party later tonight.

And I had a bigger shirt on over it. It's just way too hot right now. So you get me in a t-shirt today? No, we all get.

Richard Walker: 15:22

To see the heart on your chest. It's great.

Nickie Froiland: 15:24

You do, you do. It's fun to wear. Yeah. So too many times, our businesses, we define them based on what we sell or what service we provide. And that's really lame.

It's boring. It doesn't connect anyone to you. You know, so you sell pictures. Great. Well, what do you think?

Pictures. Why do you sell pictures? And when people are able to do that deep exploration, which is part of what we guide them through and pinpoint their purpose, they then can figure out, okay, well, how will I act, operate, make decisions in a way to support it? So a real easy example I can give you is our own company. And I will also put an asterisk next to our own company.

We believe so much that you cannot do this work for yourself that we hired another company to do for us what we do for other businesses.

Richard Walker: 16:31

Nice.

Nickie Froiland: 16:32

And this other company helped us figure out our purpose is fulfillment. Period. End of story. And the purpose of a business is most often including apple giant organization. The purpose of a business is most often equal to the purpose of the founders.

And then you learn how to create a business that can live beyond the founders, that that permeates and represents that purpose. So our purpose is fulfillment. That happens to be the founders purpose of this business. It's what gets my husband and I out of bed. We love to help other people find fulfillment.

We are not as wired to find fulfillment for ourselves, but helping somebody else find fulfillment fulfills us. Okay, that's the purpose. How do we operationalize it? And you talked earlier. We had like a mini-coaching session. Impromptu. When we first met and you received it. So our operational phrase is further, faster. Can we help the person and the business see what they cannot see? Like if you go from being a car to being a convertible, you can now see new things.

Richard Walker: 17:54

Great analogy.

Nickie Froiland: 17:55

So can we help them see what they cannot see? And will they then take action that will help them go faster? So fulfillment is our purpose. The way we operationalize it is we determine if we're going to be able to help the business and the people within it see further, so that they can go faster. And then everything we do, we live according to our values.

Our values spell the phrase let go because we most often have a belief or an idea or an opinion or a behavior that we need to let go of, and that lets in something else. So every business needs to determine what is their purpose. How do you support that purpose? And what are the values by which you will live and everyone else will live? I like to call values dinner table rules.

As long as we're all living by these, let's come to the table and have dinner. If not, go to your room and you can come back to the table when you're ready to follow the rules. And if you're never ready to follow the rules, it's called you're fired. So that's kind of how we do it. Now just to play this out another minute longer.

So fulfillment and helping people see further and go faster. Our business happens to be a business consulting executive coaching and operational advising firm. That's what we do. We could also sell clothing. Sure.

We could be a clothing store because we would be able to help people find beauty in their bodies that they don't naturally see in themselves, that will then contribute to them seeing further. They then are going to go do more in their life. They're going to get to do things faster than they thought before, and that's going to make them fulfilled, which makes us fulfilled. Love it.

Richard Walker: 19:43

Love it. So what you're talking about is that lightning rod that you can measure yourself against and in terms of your purpose. Now I have two. I have a personal purpose and my company has a purpose. And the interesting thing is, I didn't really realize how to articulate both of them until I articulated the personal one.

And then the business one came second. So personally, my job is to empower others to be their best version of themselves. Don't ask me to do something that doesn't align with that. I can't. And second, with my business.

I realized, I'm going to tell you back when I started my company, I started out of the frustration of having to handwrite forms. I never wanted to fill out a form again. So I built software, and I went to market with the assumption that everybody hated filling out forms as much as I did and therefore they buy the product. It was a bad assumption, actually. What I realized over time was that what we're doing is empowering people to do their best work.

Nobody wants to spend time on paperwork because that's not their best work. They want to meet with their client. They want to give better advice. They want to further their business and grow it. But my gosh, that paperwork just is a drag on them.

So we realized our company's purpose is to empower others to do their best work. From that we. Well, I define my culture before I even started my company, because I was at the core of what I wanted was to do my best work, and I had defined four tenets of my company culture to empower me to do my best work. And so now, as I'm going through this process with my team around KPIs and accountability, I'm realizing that these KPIs and the accountability and the structure we're putting in place actually does align with the four tenets of our culture. Like one of those tenets is we do what we say we're going to do.

What is accountability? Doing what you say you're going to do. So I don't have to feel bad about holding somebody accountable to what they said they're going to do. So I love that you have this kind of view of all this. What is it, do you think that allows you to help people see things differently?

Is there any trick to it?

Nickie Froiland: 21:49

Well, I think the obvious is I'm not in your business all day. I don't have the context you have no member of our team does. So we get to come into it fresh, without emotion, without a bias and see it from that angle. I think there is a trick to it though. And that is back to the elephants.

You've got to be willing to say what you see, and I think that's something really critical that we do is we say what we see, and our clients hold us accountable to helping them identify their elephants. And then once the elephant is in the conversation, the blind spot can be removed. I'll give you an example of myself right now, because I'm in the next phase of growth in my company as well. We're going to bring on some business development support, some marketing support, and that means it's time for me to grow in my role. Well, for 20 something years, I've been determining how to spend my time and where to allocate my time and energy based on a set of criteria.

And I now need a new set of criteria to determine where I'm going to be spending my time. And it is wildly uncomfortable. But I needed somebody to tell me that the way I was spending my time needed to change. And, you know, bringing in a CEO who has outside perspective can help. But he had to be willing to say it.

Yeah, you have to be willing to say it. So I think it's two parts. I think it's first you can see it naturally because you're not in it day to day. Then you have to be willing to say it. Now, I think if I'm inside the organization, like for you in your company.

You need to drone up. You need to get above it so that you're not mired in the minutia that you're normally mired in, so that you have a new view. I think there's a trick to that, though, too, because you have to be willing to see what's actually there and not only the things you want to see.

Richard Walker: 23:58

Yes. So I think this is so critical. I honestly, Nickie, I think there's a magic about you personally and hopefully this permeates across your team, this ability to point out to people, this truth, this thing that you're seeing. I think of it kind of like a mirror effect. If you can mirror back to them what they need to see, that they're not allowing themselves to see and help them break through that.

This is where I got my own breakthrough with you. But as a leader in your own organization, you have to be willing to be uncomfortable with the truth. And therefore, I think you have to divorce your ego. You have to be able to push the ego aside and say, this isn't about me anymore. This is about the company.

It's about the team. It's for the betterment of my people. And I can't just hold on to what is comfortable to myself. I don't know how you train that, though.

Nickie Froiland: 24:48

You're right. There certainly is an element of intuition that comes with it. I think what's trainable is helping people know how to act on their intuition. The thing that I think the world has more of than we get to see, I think the world has more people with intuition than we get to partake in, because there has become this, I don't know, kind of social norm where we may have the intuition, we may see the thing, but we don't talk about it. We just stay quiet.

So I think what differentiates us is there is an openness to talk about it. You use the mirror as an example. Literally. When my husband and I were starting this company from our kitchen in 2017, February, one of the things we said we want is we're only going to work with executives who are willing to look at themselves and their company from the inside out, and they are going to treat it like a mirror, and they're going to appreciate, own and look at everything that's in the mirror. Yeah.

Richard Walker: 25:54

One of the things that my CEO has pushed me towards, and I totally agree with, is let's pretend we're going to buy our own company. How would we evaluate it? How would we look at it? What would we see that go, oh my gosh, that's a word we don't want. And that's a really, really hard thing to do.

We started at doing that just purely financially. Like this isn't a piggy bank. We're going to run this very conservatively and carefully and make sure it's up and up, etc.. But I, I don't know. I mean, first I go back to the company culture aspect and the purpose thing, because if you haven't defined those things and you haven't aligned your values with those things, I don't know how you change.

And I meet too many entrepreneurs who don't even know what their purpose and things are. Oh, it's to make money. No it's not. Actually, that's just a byproduct.

Nickie Froiland: 26:39

I was just talking with an executive yesterday, runs a beautiful company, and asked him what his vision was. And he said to grow. To grow and expand. And I'm like, okay, well, what is the outcome you're wanting from the growth? And that's the part that you have to answer.

There's a lot of people, though who don't place value on that. There's a lot of people who don't. They don't understand how helpful those tools are, and therefore they can be dismissive of the tools. Kind of like if you have never worked with nails and you've only worked with screws, then you probably don't value a hammer. But the minute you need a hammer and all you have is a screwdriver, you're really going to wish you had a hammer.

Richard Walker: 27:29

Right? Yeah. Yeah. No. There's a bunch of things I keep thinking about.

I remember also, when we met, you talked about varying various types of elephants. Are there any that you can share that are common, that that companies can look at right now and ask themselves if they have these elephants?

Nickie Froiland: 27:47

One common one is that business partners want different things.

Richard Walker: 27:52

And does that mean they're not asking each other what they want? They're assuming.

Nickie Froiland: 27:56

Well, when you have a partnership, you know, whatever that partnership might look like in business or in life, after it's gone on for a while, it's kind of easy to just assume it's going from the same place it started. And so I like to call that it's kind of an in-the-middle partnership. And if you don't take a minute, Ferris Bueller here, if you don't take a minute to stop and kind of check in every now and then, then you might be operating off of different assumptions at some point. And that is incredibly common. Incredibly common.

Another thing that's very common is that an owner's personality is a bigger challenge than the owner realizes. It can be because they're too humble. It can be because they're too bold. It can be because they're too aggressive. It can be because they're conflict-avoidant.

But that's very common that the owner founder, CEO's personality is causing waterfall issues that they are completely unaware of. Now, that's an interesting point because for everyone on the leadership team, maybe even the whole company, that's an elephant. Our boss is X. Totally an elephant for everybody else. For the boss.

It's a blind spot. They don't even know it. Right. And then what's worse is nobody's coming to them and telling them. Or if they do, it's not received well. And so nothing ever gets done with it. That's a really common one.

Richard Walker: 29:33

Man, I struggled with that one, Nickie. Years ago, because we hired an engineering team that's offshore. We've been working with them for since 2010, and somewhere in the 2013 1415 area, I started to realize the results of what they were doing was not as good as it could have been. And the problem was, I wanted them to tell me the best way to do things. I wanted them to come up with the best ideas.

I wanted them to follow best practices in the industry, but they were doing it my way. Guess what? I'm not a classically trained software developer. I'm a hack. I figured it out. So why is my way the better way? It's not. And I kept fighting it. They're like, but you're the boss, so we have to do it your way. Oh, it took years. It took years to unwind that and get them to look at that. But it also took me years to realize that was happening.

Nickie Froiland: 30:18

Yeah, I think that is the most common statement you just made that anybody listening, anybody that's run a business can if they're very, very, very willing to look at the facts and everything that's in the mirror, they can say that same statement. It took me years to identify X. Yeah. And that's what's so disheartening is other people saw it and didn't know how to talk to you about it. Yeah.

And this is where one of our values is love. I like to say in a Motus9 exchange, we hope you always experience love. Before I hopped on with you, I was in a phone call, and it was a difficult phone call to have. And I'm thinking about the customer experience and also the business. And sometimes the two of those can have.

There can be some conflict or some overlap in what's best for both parties. And I definitely am committed to finding that. And I didn't have the answer on this call. And yet, I hope that what I delivered on this call was love. Because I believe love is saying what needs to be said, not what's easy to say.

Richard Walker: 31:32

Yeah, yeah. Well, I know I've been wanting to say the hard things. I don't shy away from it. And it's still hard every single time.

Nickie Froiland: 31:41

What's the hardest thing you ever had to tell someone?

Richard Walker: 31:43

The hardest thing. Hardest thing I, you know, I suppose in business, because I've done this many times, is when I've had to let people go and they didn't know that was going to happen. They had no anticipation of it. Like, we've had cutbacks. We've had to do layoffs.

I've had a situation where I told the team members that over the years, if we're not improving, it's going to come to a point where we just can't keep going forward. And that happened. I mean, I cried when I let a couple people go because it was just really, really hard to face that. But it was the right thing for them and the right thing for the company. Now, why do I say it's right for them?

I'm holding them back. I wasn't empowering them to do their best work anymore.

Nickie Froiland: 32:23

I was actually going to call attention. It's fascinating how hard that is for so many leaders. Yet if you pay attention to the phrase the answer's in the phrase, you are letting them go. You are letting them free. While you're doing that, you're also letting yourself free.

It's a very, very lucky thing. You're giving both of you an opportunity to move on to what's next. It just so happens that it's much easier for it's not easier. It's usually more necessary for the employer to make that decision because the employee, while they know they're better off going somewhere else, it's also pretty easy to stick around and keep getting a paycheck. Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so the employer has to make the decision sometimes to say, yeah, your time's come to an end. Come on. Most of the time that was the elephant.

They knew that a long time ago.

Richard Walker: 33:23

And so actually this answers a different question, which is how do you prevent those difficult situations. How do you prevent having to let somebody go, especially if they've been with you for five, ten, 15 years or whatever it is? Right. And I think part of it is for me, if we have a culture of accountability, it's easier to measure that, and it's easier for them to see it because they can see their own accountability. Are they meeting their metrics or not?

So it's easier for them to see that they're not getting there. But it's also a rigor. Having the accountability is going to cause them to do the work or not. And we'll notice it. And if they're not doing the work, they're aware.

Nickie Froiland: 33:57

What would you do if you got a rock in your shoe when you're walking on the sidewalk?

Richard Walker: 34:02

Or take off the shoe and take the rock out immediately.

Nickie Froiland: 34:05

What would happen if you didn't take the rock out?

Richard Walker: 34:09

It would probably blister and hurt me and cause damage.

Nickie Froiland: 34:12

How many times do we have a pebble in our shoe? A little rock in our shoe. Meaning this person showed up late today and instead of saying, hey Sarah, we don't do late here. So, you know, I get it. We make mistakes. Today is a free pass. It won't happen again. Do we agree that you're going to be on time from now on? Sarah looks at you. She's like, you're right.

I'll be on time from now on. That's a pebble moment. Yeah. Sarah is late today, and then she's late three times next week, and then two years from now, she's late every day. That's a giant rock situation that you have allowed to become a big deal.

It is now a blister. So now it's painful. So I'm going to push back. You don't avoid these things. You don't avoid them, you address them as they happen, and they become more commonplace for every party to address, which means they never turn into a blister.

Richard Walker: 35:13

That's even better. That's even better. Oh, man. Nickie, we could talk for a long time here, but I do have to wrap up our conversation before I get to my last question. What is the best way for people to find and connect with you?

Nickie Froiland: 35:25

Well, Motus9.com is the best way. You can also find me on LinkedIn. My. My name is Nickie Froiland. Last name F-R-O-I-L-A-N-D. You can check the weather in Froiland, Norway as well. I'm pretty proud to have this last name for the last almost 30 years of my life, and my favorite way for people to connect with me is not. Social media is by my cell number and I will give it to you. It's (512) 710-6751. I welcome anyone to reach out.

Richard Walker: 35:57

Nice. You're my third guest to give out their cell phone number. Super brave, I love it. All right, here is my last question. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role?

Nickie Froiland: 36:09

Yeah. I'm going to answer in a way I don't normally. My husband, when we spent a lot of time with our niece and nephew as they were growing up, he would talk to them about how critical it is to be clear on what you don't want as much as you're clear on what you do want. And I think the leader that had the most impact on me is a leader who taught me what I didn't want. And it was when I was working at McDonald's in 1990 to 1994.

I started when I was 16 years old. It's it has been the bedrock to my understanding of business in general. I learned a great deal at McDonald's. And what I learned from this leader. I learned not to judge people.

I learned not to be dismissive of people. I learned not to gloat or flaunt what you have that others don't have. And so on the positive side, from those what not to do's. I learned to be inclusive and inviting. I learned to treat people the same, regardless of where they are economically or in society or with their careers.

We all have a fabulous potential. And secondarily, my husband is a leader that I have learned an immense amount from. And the biggest thing I have learned from him is to stay steady in the storm.

Richard Walker: 37:52

Love it. You guys have been doing this for a while, so you've had, I'm sure, your share of storms and challenges and difficult clients and all the things. Yeah, I love those answers because knowing what you don't like is so important, and learning not to do those things is so important. Man, thank you for sharing that. All right. I want to give a big thank you to Nickie Freiland of Motus9 for being on this episode of The Customer Wins.

Go check out Nickie's website at motus9.com. And don't forget to check out Quik! at Quickforms.com where we make processing forms easy. I hope you enjoyed this discussion, will click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channel for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Nickie, thank you so much for joining me today.

Nickie Froiland: 38:36

Oh thank you Rich. It was awesome.

Outro: 38:40

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