The Power of Emotional Intelligence in Business with Tim Vogel

**SPEAKER_2** (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 Zegas** (0:17)
Yeah, so I was explaining this on the last show, my dog had this haircut where he was very fluffy, but the face was very trimmed closely. And so the really tiny head on this big looking Maltese mix, but he then he had these spikes, the spikes up on the head. I don't know what they're doing to the spikes. And then he's got not the greatest dental work. So it featured this dental work. And so, yeah, anytime I show people those pictures from four years ago, Tim, they're like, they're like, jump back.

**Tim Vogel** (0:46)
New artistry was happening there.

**Stephen Zegas** (0:49)
Yeah. And the groomer was so proud. She's so proud. And I'm just like, I came home and I'm like, whoa, what just happened?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:58)
Who did this?

**Stephen Zegas** (0:59)
Who assaulted my dog?
Anyway, welcome to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen Zegas, joined by Mike Lusky. And we're going to dive into the power of emotional intelligence in business and how empathy, self-awareness, resilience can transform not only company culture, but also customer experience and business outcomes. And we've got a special guest. We're going to dive into this with Mike. Introduce our guest today.

**Mike Lusky** (1:27)
Oh, absolutely, Stephen. Happy to and also thanks to our followers for joining us once again today. So with us today is Tim Vogel. He founded Scenthound to create a new category of pet care focused on wellness and not just grooming. Under his leadership, Scenthound has grown quite rapidly, creating a thriving franchise model based on purpose-driven mission and also incorporating emotional intelligence, which we're going to talk a lot about today. So Tim, welcome to our show. We're so happy to have you.

**Tim Vogel** (2:02)
No, so excited to be here to have this conversation. So thanks for having me on.

**Mike Lusky** (2:06)
And it is an important one. Yeah, for sure. So to start us off, Tim, maybe you can share with us how emotional intelligence has sort of shaped your leadership journey and even the creation of Scenthound.

**Tim Vogel** (2:20)
Yeah, so this entrepreneurial journey has been a long one for me, and it's been over 20 years.
And I always say kind of the business goes as the leader goes. And so it's really a personal journey. It's a personal evolution. And when you talk about emotional intelligence and empathy, there's a level of self-awareness that is needed for you to be able to kind of break through some of these boundaries as you go through business. Because every stage of that entrepreneurial journey has barriers in the way, and the barrier is you. And so you have to be able to have a level of self-awareness, and also a group of people around you that can help point out your blind spots so that you can evolve with the business. And so that evolution, the evolution of our business is, I think, synonymous with the evolution of Tim Vogel.

**Stephen Zegas** (3:11)
Yeah. So and I think that self-awareness is key, right? Because if you don't know your issues or your problems or your blind spots, right? That's just going to manifest in the rest of the business, right?

**Tim Vogel** (3:25)
Totally. And, you know, it's funny throughout our business. So we bring employees into our corporate location. We onboard franchisees and become partners with them as we take this franchising journey. And they bring in staff into their centers as well. And one of the key characteristics we look for in all three of those areas is coachability. So when we're interviewing a franchisee, potentially come on and they're interviewing us, this is a 10-year relationship, right? So it's a super important relationship. And so when we think about coachability, it's actually the ability for us to have an interaction and be able to evolve together. And when I think about coachability, there's a layer below coachability. That's the thing that we're actually searching for, which is some level of self-awareness. And I think if you've got some level of self-awareness, you are then in a better position for coachability, which then puts adaptability, which then allows you to go through or have the mental flexibility to go through all the different stages of the entrepreneurial journey, because franchisees are also on that entrepreneurial journey. So it's it's critical. That's kind of the key characteristic we're looking for, for people that join our corporate team, that people join through the franchising system, and the people that join their businesses.