The Power of Emotional Intelligence in Business with Jennifer Lemcke

**SPEAKER_2** (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 here with my co-host, Mike Liwski, and our special guest today. So research from Harvard Business Review shows that 90% of top performers have high emotional intelligence, yet many organizations still focus primarily on technical expertise. So emotional intelligence or EQ is more than a leadership trait. It's kind of a foundation for trust, collaboration and long-term success. And today, we're exploring how emotional intelligence can drive business performance, strengthen culture, and turn organizations into thriving communities. Mike, introduce our special guest today.

**Mike Liwski** (1:00)
Oh, I'm absolutely delighted too, Stephen. We have with us today Jennifer Lemcke. She is a CEO of Weed Man, and that is one of North America's largest lawn care franchise systems. They have over 700 locations in Canada, the US, and in the UK.
Now, Jennifer is really well-known for her dynamic leadership, because she's able to blend strategic vision along with the topics that we really enjoyed talking about, is human-centered leadership, which we know is key to emotional intelligence. She has been as well instrumental in cultivating a purpose-driven franchise throughout their whole system, infusing purpose into their culture, and that helps prioritize people, develop, and create emotional intelligence as a key to their success. So we're really looking forward to diving into this topic with her today. Jennifer, welcome to our show. We are delighted to have you.

**Jennifer Lemcke** (2:00)
Thanks for having me. I'm just really thrilled to be able to talk about business and people for the next hour. So I'm super excited.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:08)
Yes, this is always the highlight of my week. One of the shows we do, being able to dive into these topics. So Jennifer, you've led one of the, as Mike said, one of the largest franchise networks through massive growth and transformation. From your experience, what role has emotional intelligence played in that success?

**Jennifer Lemcke** (2:30)
I would say it's probably the core of our success, along with a lot of other business systems and processes and all of that. But you need that to run a good business and to be able to almost copy paste and allow it to go from market to market to market. What the other part of it is the part you really have to be intentional about. You can build a system, you can use a system, but to be really people focused, you have to be intentional and how do you weave that through? We are a company that's very much known for business planning, flowing through like SOPs and that type of thing like that. That's kind of a given. But I think where we may diverge from some others is that you can have the best systems in place, but if you're not intentional about people's success and really be focused on that. So, you know, that is something that I kind of grew up. I grew up in the business. My dad bought his first franchise. He was a single unit territory from Des Rice, our founder. And he always said he was an engineer by trade. And he always said, you know, when I when I'm going to run my business, I'm going to run it like it was a big organization. I'm going to build the systems. I'm going to make sure I'm intentional about training, making sure that I onboard people. And he always kind of helped true to that. And, you know, as he was became successful inside of the business, he he then grew into one of Des's largest multi unit franchisees. And that's when my husband and I got involved in the business. And as we were continuing to grow as just a franchisee, we were, you know, faced with the realization we were kind of the first franchise to hit a million, to hit 2 million, to hit 10 million, to hit 20 million, to hit 30 million. And we were having to build a lot of systems along the way. And when I say systems, it's not just the the financial systems to run a business. It's also the systems to onboard people. How do you bring people on? How do you show, how do you become an organization that you can really hire for attitude instead of the technical knowledge? I think we mentioned that in the pre-show a little bit. So, you know, I always come back to, I remember as we were growing in ops before we started franchising, we dissected the book, The E-Myth. Have you heard of the E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerberg? So that for us was a pivot change. Build the system so then you can hire anybody you want, anybody with a great attitude because the system is there. You can teach them the technical skills, but you can't teach them the people skills. So go out and hire the right people, the right people are going to fit with your culture, the right fit for you that's going to bring you to that next level. So if I go back to the story of my dad, that's when we approached Des and we bought the master rights to the US. The reason I'm getting into a little bit of my story is just so that you can understand the scope of where we came from. So as we bought the master rights to the US to expand Weed Man from Des, we partnered with Des and things were just really great. We were growing and I was kind of moved out of operations and really led the franchising side. My husband stayed in the ops for a few years, then joined me on the franchising side. Des unfortunately passed away, I'd say about 15 years ago. His wife, Brenda, was very still involved in the business, but she approached us about six years ago to say, hey, would you consider buying out the master rights? That's kind of where we transitioned from being a franchisee to a master franchisor to now owning the worldwide rights to the franchise.