Building Community and Connection in Business with Paul Flick

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome back to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach with my co-host, Mike Liwski, as always, and our special guest today. So recent Deloitte study found that 94 percent of executives believe a distinct company culture is vital to business success. Yet only 19 percent say they have the right culture in place. So culture is built through community, not policy, and when people feel connected to something greater than themselves, performance and purpose often follow. So today, we explore how connection fuels business success with the focus on franchising, leadership, and creating a sense of belonging that last. Mike, introduce our guest today.

**Mike Liwski** (0:57)
Oh, Stephen, I would be absolutely delighted to. So our guest today is Paul Flick. He's the founder and the CEO of Premium Service Brands, which is a multi-brand franchiser that's really behind leading home service companies, including 360-degree painting, ProLift garage doors, and KitchenWise, which I know many of us have heard of. Now, Paul as well has built a thriving franchise ecosystem by focusing on people first. We love that, Paul. Really focusing on people first by creating a community of business owners who share values, the vision, and purpose. Now, Paul, we are so looking forward to the discussion today. Welcome to our show. We're delighted to have you.

**Paul Flick** (1:44)
Thanks, Michael. Thanks, Stephen, for having me. I'm looking forward to it as well.

**Stephen Sakach** (1:49)
So Paul, there's a recent Gallup study that found that employees who feel a sense of belonging are 3.5 times more likely to be engaged at work. So in franchising, you got the connection is distributed all across everywhere, right? So it can be difficult to maintain some of that belonging. What systems or behaviors help create a sense of unity across locations like that?

**Paul Flick** (2:16)
Yeah, I think we've got two groups of people. One is obviously the ones that work in our head office that we have access to on a day-to-day basis. That is a lot easier to create and sustain that culture. It's how do you flow it from there down to the franchise partners who all work remote and we see them in person once, two, three times a year. That is obviously more difficult and you got to rely on a lot of technology. But the number one thing that I have found is communication. I've been told this in my marriage, as communication is everything, I would say that it's a huge part of our culture here in being able to communicate what we're doing down to the franchise partners. They have lots of different assets. They have their own closed group where they can ask questions and collaborate together, help support other franchise partners in that system. Then we have quarterly calls that are company-wide, all franchise partners, all brands, all executive team, all employees. Then we have monthly newsletters as well. That's coming from Premium Service Brands. The brands themselves have newsletters that go out every other week, and then they have every month a brand call that is individual to their brand. Honestly, the communication is critical to continue to send the message down that is consistent.
It is very transparent.

**Mike Liwski** (3:44)
Now, as that scales, Paul, are there even other steps that you're taking to try to keep that sense of belonging strong?

**Paul Flick** (3:52)
We have FAC setups in all the brands, so we have that individual contact with them on a weekly basis. We have pilot groups that we'll work with if we're going to be testing and rolling out something, so we get their feedback first. And down to the KidsLift initiatives that we have that we're rolling out into the individual franchise locations. But it really gets down to the communication and that involvement, those touch points you have with the franchise partners. Yeah.

**Mike Liwski** (4:24)
I mean, I say all the time, right? So many of the world's problems could be solved through communication. Paul, I want to dive a little bit more, maybe learn a little bit more about your culture at Premium Service Brands. So how would you maybe describe your culture, and then also what do you do to maintain specifically the culture at Premium Service Brands? Yeah.

**Paul Flick** (4:49)
I think we give a lot of autonomy to our franchise or to our employees. That is first and foremost. We set expectations properly, what is expected, and to give you an example, like we have 14 to 16 days a year, just holidays, whether for Thanksgiving, we give them Wednesday off, obviously the Thursday and the Friday. So everybody has a five-day weekend for Thanksgiving. On top of that, they have unlimited PTO. If they're getting their job done and they've got family or kids that they've got to focus on, or they need a mental day, or they want to travel to Europe and work there for two weeks, or work there for one week and vacation for a week. All those things, I really believe that they feel ownership, and they have autonomy to get their jobs done and to do it well, but also have a lot of freedom and autonomy to feel like that they are independent of their responsibilities.