Building Community and Connection in Business with Matt Dyer

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
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)
Well, welcome back to The show everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach here again with my co-host Tullio Siragusa, and we've got a special guest who we'll introduce in a moment.
So according to Harvard Business Review, companies that prioritize customer experience and trust, outperform competitors in revenue growth and profitability, and as organizations scale, maintaining connection becomes more complex and also becomes more critical. So the ability to deliver consistently on a brand promise while building trust is often the challenge. Today, we're exploring how leaders can build community and connection in ways that directly impact growth, performance, and long-term success. Tullio, introduce our special guest today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:04)
Happy to. Our guest today is Matt Dyer, who is the CEO and president of Merchant Fleets, where he leads the company's strategic focus on delivering consistent client value and driving sustainable growth. Under his leadership, Merchants has strengthened its position as a strategic partner, helping organizations navigate modern fleet complexities while improving performance and long-term results.
With decades of global experience, Matt is recognized for building high-performing organizations through operational excellence and innovation. Before joining Merchants, he served as CEO of LeasePlan USA, where he led significant transformation initiatives and played a key role in the successful integration with wheels. His earlier career includes serving as CEO of LeasePlan UK, and as Chairman of UK's Vehicle Rental and Leasing Trade Association. Thanks for being with us today, Matt. We're looking forward to our discussion. Welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast.

**Matt Dyer** (2:04)
Thank you, Tullio. Amazing introduction. Thank you for all of that, and great to be with you, Stephen, as well. So, yeah, delighted to be joining with you, and looking forward to contributing to such a great topic today.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:16)
Yeah, this is going to be fun, and especially you're in this industry that's going through all these changes, as we mentioned before, so with autonomous vehicles and things, and you guys are poised for all those changes, but changes can be challenging, so we're going to get into it a little bit. So, Matt, community, it's often seen as something kind of intangible, but in your experience, especially leading large organizations, how does that community translate into the measurable business outcomes, do you think?

**Matt Dyer** (2:48)
Yeah, I mean, I think, Stephen, the biggest one I would pick out is how community plays out for your clients.
What is community?
It's values, it's behaviors, it's teamwork, team spirit, it's the sense of collaboration. And when you're in a business like we are, we're effectively, we're an outsourcing business. You know, companies, our clients are outsourcing operation of their vehicles to us. And, you know, that's a core business for them. You know, these are all mission critical vehicles. So community really needs to show up for the client. And, you know, I think about the breadth that we offer as a business, you know, everything from buying the vehicle, funding it, you know, servicing it, maintaining it, fueling it. You know, this is real breadth. It brings complexity. So to really deliver for our clients, our teams have to really play and collaborate well. And that's where community really has the most tangible outcome. You know, we have a role to deliver a great service, but that comes with overcoming issues and challenges. And how our team comes together to do that is really an important part of, you know, how we need to differentiate ourselves in the market. And, you know, the message I consistently bring to our company is, you know, us as organizations, we all find our way into these divisional silos. But clients never see us like that. They always see us across the horizontal. So it's our job to make sure we don't show up to reinforce silos, that we really do work with boundary partners and collaboration. And yes, done well, it needs structure. We have an amazing program, our Heart and Hustle program. It's the number one priority for us in our business. It's overall our drive to have all of the key mechanisms in place to have the best possible client retention. But if you think of a couple of those, one of those big callouts is winning on service quality. And you can't do that unless you've got a great sense of teamwork, a sense of community and a sense of collaboration. And it almost goes even further into the way we show up for our clients. We really bring a multi-layered relationship. You have an executive relationship with a client, you have a strategic account manager, an operational account manager, a consultant, people managing the in-live services. How that team come together as a community to get the best outcomes for our clients is really important. And it is measurable. Now, we see it in our net promoter score. We see it in our client tenure, our loyalty scores. We see it in the willingness for our clients to buy more services from us.