Welcome to your business, the show dedicated to helping your growing business. Over the past five years, the business of body cams has grown significantly. As weve seen in the news, body cams have played an Important Role for Police Forces around the country. Today we meet the man behind wolf com body cams whos worked diligently with Law Enforcement to come up with products that help them do their job. Open the door hes running. When Los Angeles Based wolfcom entered the Police Body Camera space in 2011, the littleknown Company Quickly became an industry leader. At the time, there were only two other competitors. We were the big three in the united states. Peter is the force behind the booming business that built its reputation on technological innovations. Our phones were ringing off the hook. We did very little marketing. The other two competitors, they had no gps, no night vision. We were the first to introduce a highquality video. But four years after peter launched wolfcoms first camera, his world came to a crashing halt. One of our competitors decided, how can i destroy this company . Basically, they just told me that, hey, were going to bury you. I was in a meeting when, you know, one of my employees walked in and said you need to look at the news. We have no more software. Our competitor just bought out the Software Company were using. Software is critical to body cams for storing and managing videos. With no warning, wolfcoms Software Partner was acquired for 13 million by the biggest player in the industry. Next thing you know, our customers started calling us. There were rumors that wolfcomm was done. Peter was blindsided by this devastating blow, at a complete loss for a viable solution. But the body cam industry had always been cut throat and building wolfcom had not been easy. When peter came up with the concept, he was actually living out his 007 dreams, running a spy shop in hollywood. Lapd officers frequently stopped by. This one particular officer kept coming back almost every day looking through every product we have, and he would always leave empty handed. The ever curious peter had to ask why. He says, look at me, i have over 30 pounds of gear on my belt, all over my body. If only you can just put a spy cam or put a camera into something im already wearing. Thats when i took a look and saw his lapel mike. Two years later, the wolfcom third eye hit the market with a camera built right in the lapel mike that officers wear. We started putting a lot of ideas into this, including gps, night vision, the ability to zoom in and out. Open the door, please. [ gunfire ] shots fired. We came from that background of electronics, small cameras. Thats how we were able to stay in the game. Keep your hands where i can see them every time we noticed a police shooting, we always saw a spike in sales. But the 2014 shooting of an unarmed teenager named Michael Brown in ferguson, missouri, became a game changer for the body cam industry. Suddenly, everybody and their grandmother wanted in on this gold rush, on this gold mine. I knew that it would blow up. This dramatic shift in the market and the overnight saturation of other body cam startups was not good for wolfcom. Now were competing with so many other competitors, trying to push ourselves up to the front. It got a lot harder just to make a buck. There was also a major problem overseas. Wolfcom body cameras became targeted by counterfeiters. Peter had made the mistake of having one factory handle every part of the manufacturing and assembly. All it took was one untrustworthy employee, and the wolfcom winning formula was out there for every competitor to see. You get people who they just got no morals, no conscious. I spent over 100,000 just on attorneys, chasing people. After learning that harsh lesson, peter went to the other extreme, creating too many moving parts to the wolfcom manufacturing process. Next thing you know, were dealing with up to 80 vendors. Then we have inventory problems. You have everything except one piece and theres a twomonth delay, but youve got a customer who ordered a thousand units. When i did it that way, theres no copy cat, but it is a pain in the butt. Eventually, peter fixed this too. By the time he lost his Software Partner in 2015, he had years of startup wisdom under his belt. His resilience pushing through tough times and willingness to deal with every obstacle paid off. I needed to go somewhere id never gone before. I needed to step into the darkness and turn it into light. Then i decided that wolfcom was going to evolve into a Software Company. The body camera business is now on track to become a billiondollar industry, making the competition even more fierce. Some players have been accused of using unfair tactics to secure contracts from cultivating close ties to police chie chiefs to splurging on luxury vase kag vacations for other Law Enforcement decision makers. And some Police Departments have also come under fire, approving a nobid process, which allows a Single Company to secure a body cam deal without facing any competition along the way. Our model for wolfcom is honor, encourage, and integrity above all else. Well never stoop to that level. After 17 years, ive learned something. Im still here. You need to think of your life like an airplane, always going forward, never going back. You cant go backwards. How many times have you passed a homeless person on the street and wished that you were doing more to help them . One los angeles woman decided to stop wishing, start a business, and dedicate herself to helping. Nbcs Morgan Radford has her story. Hope, strength, and create. Words of encouragement stamped on keys and turned into jewelry, each key made by someone who hopes to one day have a reason to use it. How many people have you tran silgsed out of homelessness . 70plus people have gotten Job Opportunities here. Growing up in hollywood, katelyn has worked as an actress and released pop music but was seeking a way to make a bigger impact. In 2009, after encountering a young homeless couple, a light went off, and she turned a simple jewelry idea into business with a big impact. I love that so much. Today the giving keys factory in downtown l. A. Sits just a couple blocks from skid row, where some of l. A. s 46,000 homeless reside. Here katelyn employs people trying to transition off the streets, and the keys they create are then sold under one condition. That the buyer gives their key to someone who needs it more. This isnt just about jewelry to wear because its cool. It really trains you to keep your eyes open to somebody whos going through a hard time. People like Kelly Williams. Ive done drugs. Ive stole. Ive done practically everything you can think of. What was your ahha moment . What was the moment when you were at your lowest and said, i cant live like this anymore . I went to prison practically every two years. I wanted Something Better for my life. Since youve been working here, youve been able to get other things and kind of come into transitioning to have your own place. Yeah, i did it in six months working for them. Wait, waited, wait. Back up. Hold on, hold on. Youre saying in six months of working here yeah, my life will never be the same. I want to do good for the rest of my life. Which is why experts say the giving keys could be a model for the rest of the country. Theyre taking men and women that have no other option, teaching them a marketable skill, teaching them to work in a team, teaching them to be proud of a product and services being delivered. And theyre making money doing this. So theyre legit. Giving people like Kelly Williams a second chance. You can just make an impact on one person, you know, thats the best feeling in the world. Perhaps even the key to happiness. Morgan radford, los angeles. Its one thing to sell your products to local consumers. It is another to sell to a major buyer with national distribution. Here are five ways to attract big buyers. One, use data like website visitors to show how your product resonates with consumers. Two, always have a pitch ready. You need know when you may meet someone who can help you out. Keep your phone or tablet stocked with compelling images and charts and have a fact sheet with all of your speck and contact sheet ready. Three, attend trade shows. These are great places to meet new buyers. Make the most out of it by sending your most knowledgeable and upbeat employees. If you have a booth, avoid leaving it so theres always someone around to answer a question. Four, partner with a broker. Sales brokers already have relationships with big buyers and know how to get your products in front of the right people. But they also have reputations to protect. Like the buyers, before they partner with you, theyre going to want to make sure that your product will sell. Five, make sure your product is ready to ship. If you do build a relationship with a buyer and then you cant fulfill it, that is going to lead to problems right then and later on. Mow its time for our brain trust. Today were doing it from these amazing offices of warby parker here in new york city. Today we have neil blumenthal, whos the founder of warby parker, now with more than 1300 employees and a valuation of more than a billion dollars. And jana rich, founder of the rich talent group, who works with partners like warby parker, to recruit top talent. Thank you so much for inviting us here. Thanks for having us. Good to see you. I want to talk to you about retention. You have 1300 employees here. I imagine youve had some turnover over the years. Is retention what we should be looking for as owners of companies, as people who run divisions of companies . What do you think . I think its really important to assess who you are losing and where your company is in terms of phase of growth. Very Fast Growing Companies who are morphing and changing dramatically are going to need different people. So i think we have to be careful retaining the people we want to and not losing those that we dont. Because people are always saying you want high retention, right . Its been the mantra since the beginning of time. I imagine the people you dont have your whole original team. Two of your founders arent here. I think its important to have these folks that exemplify the values of the company. Those folks dont necessarily need to have been here since the beginning. But i agree with jana completely that if you dont want 100 retention, you want some turnover, you want people coming in with fresh skill sets, fresh perspectives, and i think theres this idea that culture is static and Companies Need to stay the same. Everyone is nostalgic for the past. At the end of the day, companies evolve and cultures evolve and change. Thats okay. Just like real cultures evolve and change. America is different today than it was a generation ago. So at what point do you look at your own company, your own division, and say, okay, im losing people too quickly versus i am losing people at the right speed because the company or the division is changing . I think its the reason why people are leaving. If people are leaving because they dont see growth opportunities, if people are leaving because they feel like theyre not getting paid well, those are things to dig into. If people are leaving because, you know, you need to bring in somebody with more expertise and thats actually changing their growth trajectory, thats okay. Hopefully theyll get a better opportunity elsewhere and well support them in that and thats fantastic. Its also interesting to look at what pockets and where is it happening, meaning if all the sudden youve got a lot of people leading your marketing team, is there something wrong there . Meaning, do you have to look at the leadership of that team . Is something going wrong . Or if four or five members of a tenperson Leadership Team are leaving, that has a huge impact on how the outside world views your company. So those are two examples where you have to stop and say, wait a minute, whats happening . Lets talk about that, the outside world. When companies go through periods of change, oftentimes a lot of people leave. Either theyre laid off or leave themselves. How do you deal with the perception of that when youre doing it because the company is actually moving forward . From the outside, it may look like its moving backwards. At least what i would say about that is its really interesting from our vantage point. Well start to get a lot of inbound calls from Senior Executives when something is not going right with a company. I say were always an early indicator if retention is going to be an issue or if something is at least potentially wrong with the company. If, for example, those are clients we work with, well at least give them a heads up. Well never say specific names of people, but hey, theres a lot of people loose in your marketing team. It might be something you need to look at. Being able to have some sense of how thats being perceived externally, because sometimes we can get in our own little bubbles. We know why, but the outside world doesnt know why. By the time thats happening, youre in a crisis mode. The question is whats your canary in the coal mine. To our perspective, its feedback. Its our Performance Management system. So we do a thing called month in review. Rather than having performance reviews once every 12 months or once every six months, we do it every month so that way there is that direct feedback from direct reports and managers. But even more important than that, we do an Anonymous Survey every six months. We call it an Employee Engagement survey. Its anonymous. We can only drill down to groups of five to protect anonymity, but we can cut the data by gender, by department, by tenure at the company so we can really get a sense of whats going on, and its a commitment we made to the team that were all going to try and make this place better and better and better. If there are people that want to leave, hopefully the reasons for that start to emerge and we can address it. And is retention a metric that you look at . Is it an important metric . Its an important metric, but ive never found anybody that defines it really clearly. And i know that sounds crazy, but what is retention . Is it cohorts of people that start on x date for how long they should actually be here . So were seven years old. Were now to 1300 employees, the majority of whom have been hired in the last 12 months. So our retention metric looks really strange. We actually dont measure it as closely as saying, hey, are we losing good people for bad reasons . All right. Thanks, both of you, so much. Thank you. Thanks. People, purpose, profits, and play. Those are the four principles that guide business at the Worlds Largest franchise gym. Anytime fitness locations are open to members 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The companys on the brink of having 4,000 locations in 30 countries with revenue hovering right around a billion dollars. Cofounder chuck runyon tells us why business is always about people and why we all need to play more in this learning from the pros. I love the quote that leaders dont build a business. Leaders build people. The people build the business. Sure, you want to have a great idea, but then you got to hire the right people and empower them to execute on the business. We place a great deal of emphasis on workplace culture. How we behave, what values we have on working together, and so we really are very rigorous through the hiring process. We try to get out of the scripted interview process. We ask questions that really want to get into their selfawareness, right. Some mistakes they made in the past. We really want to kind of break that down through a very lengthy interview process. We want them to make get on a whiteboard and give us some of their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. We will ask this them to videotape themselves or put a powerpoint together, do some type of clever Youtube Video to show some of their personality. To give people greater purpose, i mean, its combining your heart power with your brain power. They will go the extra mile. Theyll work a little bit harder. They know that theyre enriching people or the plane et beyond just a paycheck. To instill greater purpose, i think you have to be very intentional about it. When were talking about strategy for the business, first of all, why are we trying to go there, and how does this benefit others . How are we improving stakeholderss lives . With anytime fitness, its the members. Were getting them to a healthier place. Everyone must profit in this business. Of course from a financial perspective. Were in the franchise business. We have to make sure our franchisees are set up to succeed. Typically in franchising, its a percentage. So the more a franchisee does in revenue, the higher percentage we get. With anytime, our royalty is flat. As they grow their business, were capped out. Thats rewarding to the franchisee financially. 50 of our franchisees are buying and opening more stores. Thats a great testament to their success. We feel the same way about our employees. How can they come here . How can we develop their employees. How can we develop their whole stale, invest in their personal and professional growth so they can say, you know, the company made me better too. We put our revenue into a pool every year. It can fuel growth for our employees. Always be learning like a lifelong student atmosphere. We want to physically improve, mentally improve. I think companies could use a little bit more play in the workplace. 7 out of 10 people, according to gallup, drive to work every day feeling miserable or neutral about their job. Thats sad because we spend half of our waking hours at work. We have new rookie skits or stupid human tricks they have to perform. That sets the tone that we are all vulnerable and we can laugh at ourselves. At the annual conference we do a parody of popular movies. We have done star trek, top gun, the hangover. Being self deposit indicating and showing we can take the work seriously without taking ourselves seriously. The science about play validates that a company will be more curious, collaborative, they will be more creative. And we value those as we try to grow the business. When we come back, most of us have millennials on our workforce. The question is, how do you manage them . And how do you keep dealers and retailers happy when youre also selling Products Online . Thank you so much. Thank you so were a go . Yes we got a yes what does that mean for purchasing . Purchase. Lets do this. Got it. Book the flights hai si si ya ya ya what does that mean for us . We can get stuff. Whats it mean for shipping . Ship the goods. Youre a go you got the green light. That means go oh, yeah. Start saying yes to your companys best ideas. Were gonna hit our launch date scream thank you goodbye let us help with money and knowhow, so you can get business done. American express open. Do you have any tips on how to keep dealers happy if were selling our products on the website as well . Its a great question. And in todays environment, it should be completely acceptable for you to sell on your own website. The key tip i would give you is create differentiation. To really keep everybody happy and protect yourself, the key would be to offer your vendors one offering, bundles, packs, price promos and have a different set of offerings on your website in the directtoconsumer environment. Millennials are transforming the workplace. So if you are an employer and youre looking to either hire them or retain them, our guest has some ideas on how to do that. Dan is a partner and Research Director on the future workplace, an executive development group. So good to see you, dan. Happy to be here with you, j. J. I know so many people who are like millennials, they dont work as hard, they want to go home early or theyre asking for a raise all the time. You say it is relatively easy. You just have to look at things differently. Young people always think of older people wise and willing to mentor. Older people always think younger people are lazy, entitled, narcissistic and unfocused. This is not a millennial thing, it is a general racial thing. It is about where you are in your life and how you are viewing people who are younger than you or older than you. Indeed, there are things we see the workplace is transforming for everyone, not just millennials. Lets talk about millennials. They want fair pay. Not necessarily higher pay, fair pay. Everyone wants more money, of course. Whether theyre looking to get a job is, that factors into the equation. It is about fair pay for younger people because we have access to such information on our fingertips. We can go to pay scale or salary. Com is and figure out how much we should make based on our title. They are more likely to have transparent discussions on how much they are making at the same company or another company. As hiring manager, you go look at those also and show here is our scale. Here is where you fit on it and heres why. You just need to explain to people so they get their expectations up. Absolutely. Back then you would never have these discussions. Now it is so important. You can offer a ping pong table, free food, anything. Flexible work. We talk about this all the time. Companies have let people work from home, brought them back in. And everyone is dealing with this, right . Theres no 9 00 to 5 00 workplace anymore. The average workweek is 47 hours for a fulltime salary employee. And because of how technology is enabling us to answer emails and phone calls out of the office, people are working 24 7 for the same salary. They want to be able to drop off their kid to school and come to work late. People want maternal, paternal leave, flexible hours, job sharing. And not have to take the entire day off to go to a doctors appointment. Give an extra hour of lunch as long as theyre performing. Its all about results. That will matter more in the future. Which means you have to be clear what the results are. If you want a flexible schedule, you need to perform to this level. You have to make a case for everything. Okay. Learning and development. It is not the case where people come into work and just say im going to give that all to you. Employees want to know the company is investing in them as well. Especially for young people. Theyre not going to invest in time spent working at your company. And the younger you are, the more learning and development you need because you dont know very much. The older you get, the less likely you are to say you need extra training and support. Will dean is ceo of tough mudder. He has his whole staff do Harvard Business school cases. He teaches them. They learn a lot. Even as a startup they did this. People need to be challenged. If not, they will be bored and look for other opportunities which are right at their fingertips. Finally, this is so important. Link your responsibilities to the impact. Even if you are the person who is filing, shoe know why thats important for the company. A lot of people get meaningful work wrong. They think the young person just wants to change the world on the job. Thats not true. It is about linking the work theyre doing on a daily basis to something that is beneficial to their manager, to their team, to their ceo, to customers, to partners, and maybe even the world. And if they cant see that linkage, theyre not as engaged and more likely to quit. Youre spending time here. You want to know that it makes a difference for something in the company or the world. Thank you. I appreciate all the research you have done. Thanks. Happy to be here. This weeks your busy selfie comes from elizabeth daviscerami who owns yor so sweet in kennett square, pennsylvania. She makes sweet and savory crepes and crepe cakes like you see there. Pick up your cell phone, take a picture of you and your business. No professional pictures please. Send it to yourbusiness msnbc. Com. Thank you so much for joining us today. Earlier this week i heard a man speak to a group of ceos. He was one of a group of 16 people who survived a plane crash in the andes. He lived three months with no boots, no coat, no food. What he was wanting us to get out of this is, look, business is hard. Were going to face hard things in business and in life. We should be stressed about them, et cetera. But we need to remember at the end of the day what is really important. And keep your eye on that as you go through the hard things in business. Hug the one you love. At the end of the day, thats whats important. Of course we want to grow our companies and want them to be successful for a million reasons, but remember what is most important, which is the people you love. Now wed love to hear from you. If you have any questions or comments about todays show, email us at yourbusiness msnbc. Com. Please go to our website, openforum. Com yourbusiness. We posted all the segments from todays show plus a lot more. Dont forget to connect with us on all our digital and social media platforms as well. We look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, im j. J. Ramberg. Remember, we make your business our business. So thats the idea. What do you think . Hate to play devils advocate but. I kind of feel like its a game changer. I wouldnt go that far. Are you there . Hes probably on mute. Yeah. Gary wont like it. Why . Because hes gary. phone ringing what . Keep going yeah. laughs voice on phone its not millennial enough. There are a lot of ways to say no. Thank you so much. Thank you so were doing it. Yes we got a yes start saying yes to your companys best ideas. Let us help with money and knowhow, so you can get business done. American express open. Morning glory, america. Im hugh hewitt. Quite a week for news to open 2018. In my eyes, the revolt of the people of iran against the Iranian Revolutionary guard is the story that deserves the most attention this week. At least as much attention, if not more, than the arab revolts of a few years back. If iran were to overthrow and get rid of its rulers, the region and the world would be a much safer and prosperous place. There are lots of other stories as well. Here to discuss them with me as we look back to the week that were, al weave