The Power of Emotional Intelligence in Business with Josh Fitzgerald

**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 Sakach** (0:17)
Well, welcome back to the show everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach here again with my co-host Tullio Siragusa and our special guest today. So according to talent smart, emotional intelligence accounts for nearly 60 percent of performance across a wide range of jobs. And when leaders strengthen this capability, collaboration improves, conflict becomes more productive, and people are more willing to engage. So today we're exploring how emotional intelligence shows up in business and how leaders can build it into the way they work every day. Tullio, introduce our guest today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:54)
Yes, happy to. Joining us today is a leader who truly knows the Zoomin Groomin brand from the ground up. Josh Fitzgerald entered the system as a franchisee in 2023 and quickly established a reputation for building strong operations and developing talent. His hands-on success led him to join the corporate support team in 2024, where he worked to strengthen the entire network while simultaneously expanding his own portfolio to five locations. In August 2025, Josh took the helm as CEO and he joins us today to discuss how emotional intelligence shapes culture, strengthens relationships, and helps businesses perform at a higher level. Josh, welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast. We're excited to have you.

**Josh Fitzgerald** (1:40)
Oh, thank you guys so much. I really do appreciate your time. Kind of like you guys have said, you know, so many of the loyalty brands have already done this show and they were all giving me a real hard time that I waited so long. So I'm glad to jump in and get it going.

**Stephen Sakach** (1:56)
Well, we love loyalty brands. Just they're kind of infused with kind of the stuff that we're talking about. So we're making sure we're spreading the good word on you guys. And Josh and I were talking before the show, my dog is getting groomed in about an hour. And this is probably the last grooming session we're going to have before we move up north into Washington area. So he's already given me the hook up on the groomer up there for our dog. So I appreciate that, Josh.

**Josh Fitzgerald** (2:24)
Absolutely. And I'm really excited to talk about emotional intelligence in general. But yeah, like I said, after the show, I'll give you specifics on how to reach out to her, but she's phenomenal. But emotional intelligence, it's so important to me in general. And I don't know that I would have called it emotional intelligence until the last few years when that term became a little bit more popular. I've been very fortunate to be raised by parents the way that I was and around the support system that I've always had, that it was very important to control your thoughts, control what you're saying and doing, and be so thoughtful of those around you. And the only real regret I have involving it is that I don't do the best all the time at doing it. And as I grow and learn and get older, hopefully, I continue to get better in that regard. But as far as the bottom line, as far as I'm concerned, technical skills can get you really far in life and they can get you in a position of leadership for sure. But I think the metric that's going to determine how successful your leadership time is, is what level of emotional intelligence you achieve.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:37)
Yeah, from where you sit, what does that look like in the daily life as a leader?

**Josh Fitzgerald** (3:44)
Yeah. So emotional intelligence, I think for me, the easiest way to describe it is guiding your emotions versus your emotions guiding you, and making sure that they're always in check and that they're not necessarily interfering with the facts, right? Then the other side of it is how much does it impact others around you, and then kind of weighing the risk versus reward regarding that. And I think it really impacts us quite a bit in our daily lives. It can affect our tone. It can affect the way we approach a conversation. It can affect so many different things in real time. And that's the ones that are really good at it. The ones that maybe they're jumped right in the middle of a conversation and they can tell by your facial expressions if they should adjust how they're talking or what they're doing. That's the people like John Hewitt and Bob Gappa and those guys that have made loyalty kind of what it is. Because, I mean, the reality of it is, there's a difference between people don't respond the same way to things and it's up to us as leaders to adjust to them. It's not fair of us to just expect that we can say whatever we want and it will just be translated the way it should be in their ears. That's not a very fair way to go about it. Certainly when your words hold as much weight as they can as a leader. And so that's a responsibility I take really seriously. And, you know, John takes it very seriously. And when he's talking and when he's doing the things that he does, it's very impressive watching him adjust as he's in the middle of conversations. He's just so prepared and he's so well versed in like how people are going to take what he has to say.