The Power of Emotional Intelligence in Business with Jason Olsen

**Jason Olsen** (0:00)
Get along.

**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** (0:17)
Jason just ran a marathon this Saturday. How often do you do that?

**Jason Olsen** (0:22)
Gosh, this is probably my 12th or 13th.

**Stephen** (0:26)
Okay, so plenty painful enough then.

**Jason Olsen** (0:30)
Yeah, and winter time in Salt Lake is not a great time to train, so you just don't get a lot of days. There are good days to get training in. So this was down in Moab where it was sunny, but the first one of the year always hurts quite a bit. Still limping around.

**Stephen** (0:46)
Yeah.

**Mike** (0:46)
Congratulations.

**Stephen** (0:48)
Most I've done is half of that. So yeah, congrats. Welcome to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen, joined by my co-host, Mike, and our special guest. Today, we're diving into a leadership trait that often determines the difference between your good leaders and your truly great ones, and that's emotional intelligence, EQ. And research from TalentSmart shows that 90 percent of top performers have high emotional intelligence, while 20 percent of low performers do. So despite this, many organizations overlook EQ when hiring and developing leaders. Our guest today has built a thriving business, not just through strategy, but through a deep understanding of human connection, whether it's empowering independent beauty professionals or leading his own team. Emotional intelligence is at the core of his leadership philosophy. Mike, introduce everyone to our guest today.

**Mike** (1:43)
Yes, Steven, excited about that. Absolutely happy to have Jason today on the show. So we're thrilled. Jason Olsen, he's the founder and the CEO of IMAGE Studios, which many of you may have heard of or at least seen locally. So he's with us today. Jason's a seasoned entrepreneur. He's redefined as you were bringing up, Steven, the beauty industry by providing high-end, fully-equipped studio spaces for beauty professionals, really giving them the freedom to build their own business. So Jason, welcome to the show. We are so happy to have you with us today.

**Jason Olsen** (2:23)
Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

**Mike** (2:27)
Maybe Jason, we can start off with giving our audience and our listeners a little bit of background. Maybe just to start, can you tell us a little bit about your journey and then maybe how the emotional intelligence helped shape that journey?

**Jason Olsen** (2:44)
Yeah. So I started IMAGE Studios 15 years ago here in Salt Lake City, Utah.
What we do is we're similar to like a WeWork, our co-working space. But instead of executive office suites for startups, we build salon suites for beauty professionals to run their own business. And so from 2010 to 2015, I built five locations here and then in 2016 started franchising. And so went down that road. Today we have 105 locations open in 23 states across the country, and we've got another 42 that are under construction and will open at some point this year. So it's been very busy last couple of years especially, but it's awesome. I love what we do. We're empowering beauty professionals to essentially become entrepreneurs, and there's no better group of people to work with than entrepreneurs. So it's a lot of fun.

**Mike** (3:46)
Gotcha. Yeah. And then in terms of the emotional intelligence piece, how did that come into play and help shape the path that you're on now?

**Jason Olsen** (4:00)
I think it's a huge part. There's so many different ways that that plays into it. I remember something that comes to mind. I was thinking about a couple of years ago, our marketing team was clashing over the direction of a campaign that we were trying to launch. It was a national campaign, a lot at stake, a big budget, and we're trying to figure this out. But I could tell the team was getting pretty irritated and had reached a stalemate. And that was kind of a moment where there's a, the self-awareness moment, which is to like, okay, we need to probably take a second, cool off here. I think also to jump in and try and help regulate was not to pick a side. But what I started to notice is someone kind of quietly withdrew. You had another person who's sort of the loud, pushy person that's really trying to dominate. And I think trying to understand those different emotions is part of that empathy piece of just making sure you understand what's going on on the team, what's the dynamic there. But called a quick meeting, wanted each person to voice what was going on and what their concern was, and then just tried to guide everyone to a hybrid of something that they could buy into so that there was a resolution. What was interesting is this could have either gone into a serious fight and caused a lot of shutdown. But what ended up is everyone emerged with a better strategy and vision for the plan than was even originally worked out. I think in those moments of tension is where you start to have magic happen or disaster. I think if a low EQ leader is in a situation like that, they just might try and derail and force a top-down fix. Like, okay, you guys, I'm calling, here's how it's going to work. You disengage everyone and then you lose the magic of why you're in the first place. You're trying to get that extra ounce of effort. You can look at the opposite of that. Uber is a great example. They moved fast and broke all the rules, but Travis, Uber's founder, what was it?